Living Hope

Philip Miller: We find ourselves unable to resist our appetites when it comes to food or drink or sex or impulse shopping or binge-watching shows or mindless scrolling on our phones. We're dominated by our desires. We're ruled by our bodies. We are slaves to our appetites.

Larry McCarthy: Welcome to Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy. We're so glad you joined us for this series through the Sermon on the Mount. Pastor Philip, that's awfully strong language you're using. We have to eat. We want to eat. What's the alternative to being driven by our appetites?

Philip Miller: We're in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is talking about fasting. When you fast, this is how you're to do it. We've pointed out this is a cultural blind spot for us. We tend to not think about fasting in our day and age.

But really what Jesus is trying to do here is he's trying to free us from the way we normally live, which is we're dominated by our bodily appetites. We're constantly running after the things we want. We don't know how to say no to our own bodies. They're overruling us in many ways.

And so there's a freedom that Jesus wants to give us, a freedom from our bodily appetites to do the things that we actually, really, truly, deeply want and to align ourselves to the true resources and goodness of the kingdom of heaven. So Jesus wants to give us more of himself and he wants to satisfy the deepest appetites of our souls.

But in order to give us more of himself, we have to stop being enamored by all these other quick fixes, and that includes things like food. So fasting is a way of reorienting our desires, of channeling our appetites away from the things that constantly we run after in life and to tune our hearts toward God and the resources of who he is for us in Jesus Christ. So fasting is actually about feasting, feasting on God himself.

Larry McCarthy: Now beloved, you want to make sure you stay tuned after the message because Pastor Philip, he's going to get practical, and we're going to talk about what do we do when our physical appetites take too much of our attention. But now, let's go to the pulpit of the Moody Church for part two of the sermon, When You Fast. Grab your Bibles. We're in Matthew chapter 6. We're going to look at verses 16 and 18.

Philip Miller: Despite all of this cultural baggage, I want to show you this morning that fasting is nevertheless a biblical paradigm. It is a biblical paradigm. Fasting honors our created design. In Genesis 2:7, the Lord God forms the man of dust from the ground and breathes into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man becomes a living creature.

Remember this creation text. We are dust and breath. Dust and breath. We are physical and spiritual beings. Animals are just physical. Angels are just spiritual. But human beings are both physical and spiritual beings. We're amphibians like that. We can swim in the water of the spiritual and we crawl out on the land of the physical. We live in both realities.

Both dimensions of our being require attention. Our physical side needs nourishment, it needs exercise, it needs hygiene. We have to attend to our physical life to flourish. And in the same way, our spiritual life needs nourishment, needs exercise, needs hygiene. We have to attend to our spiritual side to flourish in life.

And we're holistic beings, which means we're not compartmentalized. There is interplay and interdependence between the physical and spiritual dimensions of our being. Everything we do on one side affects the other. So just look at the fall. When Satan wanted to take down humanity, the human race, when he wanted to inflict a deadly spiritual wound, how did he do it?

With food. With fruit. Genesis 3:6, "When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was delightful to the eyes, that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and she ate. And she gave some also to her husband who was with her and he ate."

Now the deep reality of what's going on in this text is that Adam and Eve chose to do what they wanted to do instead of obeying God. They didn't trust him. They sinned and the world fell apart. But notice at the very heart of the downfall of humanity is the inability to say no to our appetites. The inability to say no to our appetites.

She saw it was good, it was delightful to the eyes, desirable to make one wise. Do you see all the language about appetite there? She and Adam indulged their appetites and then the world unraveled physically and spiritually. In some sense, from that day on, our bodies have ruled over us.

We find ourselves unable to resist our appetites when it comes to food or drink or sex or impulse shopping or binge-watching shows or mindless scrolling on our phones. We're dominated by our desires. We're ruled by our bodies. We are slaves to our appetites.

But then comes Jesus, the new Adam, as Paul calls him, and he faces the temptations of Satan in the wilderness head-on, face-to-face with Satan. And how does he do it? Fasting. And what is the first temptation of Jesus? Food.

Matthew 4:1-4, "Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after fasting 40 days and 40 nights, he was hungry. And the tempter came to him and said, 'If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.' But he answered, 'It is written, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.'"

You see, Jesus succeeds where Adam failed. Where did Jesus get the strength to face this moment? Did he carb load to get ready for the big moment? No, he was fasting. It took him 40 days of fasting to have the strength to face the devil head-to-head.

That's amazing. Just like with Adam and Eve, the temptation surrounds food. But it's not really about food. It's not about the bread. That's why Jesus responds, "Man shall not live by bread alone," physical, "but by every word that comes from the mouth of God," spiritual. Dust and breath again.

"I'm sustained," Jesus is saying, "body and soul by my Father. I will trust his word. I will live from the spiritual nourishment that my Father provides even though my body is crying out in hunger." It's just the opposite of the first Adam, you see, who was ruled, overruled by his body, who was enslaved to his appetite.

Jesus, the second Adam, is overruling his body, mastering his appetite. Jesus succeeds where Adam fails, and Jesus is showing us what it means to live from the spiritual sustenance that God provides even when there's no food around. He is nevertheless metabolizing spiritual resources for life. He's physically famished and yet spiritually full. He's living from a deeper set of spiritual resources.

It's just like in John chapter 4 when the disciples left Jesus at the well and went into town to buy food, and they come back and they find Jesus ministering to the woman at the well. And they say, "Here, Rabbi, is some food," and he says, "I've had food to eat that you know nothing about." And they look at each other and say, "Could somebody have brought him lunch?"

And he says, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me." In other words, Jesus is showing us that saying no to pressing physical appetites actually enables us to say yes to deeper spiritual nourishment. Fasting, it turns out, is biblically expected. It's biblically expected. It's just assumed.

It's a routine spiritual practice. It's modeled all the way through the pages of scriptures. Moses fasted, David fasted, Elijah, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Paul, the apostles fasted together in Acts 13 and 14. Jesus fasted. Jesus expects his disciples to fast. He says, "When you fast," not "if," "when."

And friends, this turns out to be quite a helpful practice that we ought to embrace. Not only is fasting immensely beneficial to your physical health. Did you know fasting is really good for your body? It helps with weight loss. I looked all this up. It helps with weight loss, insulin sensitivity, it speeds up your metabolism, it promotes longevity in life, it improves your brain function.

It boosts production of a protein called BDNF, which is brain-derived neurotrophic factor. I have no idea what that is, but I want more of it. It improves immunity. Listen, if you're in student ministry, this one's for you. It improves acne. Yes and amen, right? All right. So it's really good for your body.

But I want to show you that fasting is spiritually beneficial. That's the main reason we do it. It's spiritually beneficial, three ways. First, fasting is helpful to us in attending to the soul. Attending to the soul. The practice of fasting, that is cutting ourselves off from food for a period of time, hours, days, sometimes weeks, is not just about saying no to the physical. It's about saying yes to the spiritual.

We're diminishing our reliance on physical nourishment in order to increase our reliance on spiritual nourishment. We're weaning off to have more. Remember, we're amphibious creatures, physical-spiritual beings. But far too often we live as if the physical is all that really matters, that this is real and that it is the most satisfying dimension of all of our lives. That's where real happiness lies.

But it's not true. The real and deeper world is the one that we too easily ignore, and it's the realm of the spiritual. It's where God is. In fasting, we are decreasing our dependency and preoccupation on the physical in order to focus our full attention on the spiritual.

Back in the first century, meal preparation took a major portion of the day's hours. Some estimate five or six hours a day just making meals for the family. But when you as a community fast, and all of a sudden those meals don't need to be made, do you realize it frees up an enormous amount of time for everyone to refocus their energy and time on God?

To read the scriptures, to pray, to worship, to reflect, to sit in solitude and stillness, to give ourselves to the unrushed attention to the spiritual side of life. That's what fasting is for. Now you can broaden the principle out. It doesn't have to be about food necessarily. You can do a screen fast.

You can put this away. Did you know you can put this away? Did you know you don't have to bring this to the restaurant? Talk about a love-hate relationship, right? You can do a phone fast, a media fast, a social media fast. Oh, you're meddling now. If you think about Sabbath, Sabbath is a day of rest. It is a fast. Sabbath is a fast from work. It is the moment to slow down and attend to our souls.

Fasting's not just about food. It's about a pattern of living to decrease our obsession with the physical so that we might attend to the spiritual.

Larry McCarthy: This is Living Hope with Pastor Philip Miller. I'm Pastor Larry McCarthy. And before we start our discussion today, we just want to give you a huge thank you for those who keep this program going through your very generous financial gifts. We'd love to send you a resource as our way of just saying thank you.

So go to livinghopeoffer.com, call us at 1-800-215-5001. We're glad you've joined us today as we examine feeding our spiritual appetites. Now Pastor Philip, in the sermon you contrasted Adam and Jesus being tempted with food and that the fall was a failure on our part to say no to physical appetites. So how do we know if these appetites are really ruling over us?

Philip Miller: I think the reality is our appetites have way more influence over us than we often give them credit for. We find ourselves saying it's hard for us to say no to food, to that little bit of extra we know we shouldn't eat, but we indulge and our appetites are really strong that way.

Or we're constantly buying more clothing than we actually need. We jam our closets full and then we've got storage units full of stuff we don't need that we bought. Like we're constantly over-accumulating. Our desires don't always fit what we need in reality. We end up getting more things than we really want.

And then we're constantly hunting after the next thing, aren't we? We're online looking at houses maybe one day we could afford or we're looking at the car, the next car that maybe we're going to buy. Our appetites are constantly being drawn out into more, more, more, more, more, more. And so the reality is our appetites are kind of inflamed. They're out of control. They're disproportionate.

Augustine was the one who first put this together for us really well. He said the basic problem with humanity is our loves are disordered. We love things that are little things way too much and we love the supreme thing, God himself, way too little. And when our loves and our affections get disordered like that, it ends up creating all kinds of problems in our lives.

So fasting is really a tool, a spiritual discipline, a spiritual exercise, a tool that helps us actually begin to address the root of that. By saying no to some of our appetites, we are able to then say yes to other appetites.

And so if our appetites for things and stuff and food and pleasure and leisure and all those things, if those things are a little bit too inflated and out of control and overruling our deeper desires which are aligned toward heaven and toward the goodness of God and have more of God in our life and to attend to the spiritual side of our life, by saying no to these appetites for a season, we're actually creating space to actually begin cultivating affections and appetites for the things that are eternal. The things that are truly enriching to our souls that matter forever.

Because we're both physical and spiritual beings at once, and we need to attend to the spiritual side of our life. And if we're not careful, it just gets clouded out in the hurriedness of life and we never actually spend any time attending to the spiritual side of our souls.

Larry McCarthy: I'm so glad you brought that up about the physical and spiritual aspect of everybody. I mean, we're in this tug-of-war, it seems, constantly between the physical and the spiritual. But Pastor Philip, why does it feel like the physical is always winning the tug-of-war?

Philip Miller: Well, it's more present, isn't it? Your stomach will literally grumble when it doesn't have food. So you have a built-in physical mechanism to make you go right back to the next meal. But when it comes to your soul, when your soul is starving, it doesn't scream in the same way. But you're just as, you might be malnourished on the spiritual side of your life, but you're not going to get the same grumbling immediate response.

So if your body, if we're embodied beings, spirit and bodies, we live in this amphibious thing, right? We're on the land of the physical, we're swimming in the water of the spiritual. We're like amphibians. Angels are just spiritual, animals are just physical, but we're both. We need to attend to both sides of our life.

But the physical is just so much more pressing. You can't ignore it. It's always going to dominate your life. And it's kind of like one of these things you've heard the distinction between urgent and important things and how the urgent always seems to crowd out the important. Tyranny of the urgent, right? It's kind of like that.

The physical is always urgent. It's just right there, front burner, you can't ignore it. You've got to sleep somewhere, you've got to get up, you've got to go to work, you've got to live in the world, you've got to eat, you've got to drink, you've got to breathe air. It's just all those physical immediate demands. They're very urgent. They're right there.

What gets neglected is the important. And that is the soul, the spirit, slowing down, attending to who you are, whose you are, the gospel, applying the truth of God's word, the still small voice of God. Those are the things that tend to get neglected. And so we've got to be the ones who slow down, who pause, who create space in our life so the spiritual side of our souls doesn't get neglected in the frantic pace of everyday life.

Larry McCarthy: Let's stay focused then for a minute on that, on spiritual appetite. What's the relationship between fasting and praying God's Word?

Philip Miller: Jesus says, right, "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God." And then he goes on later, he calls himself, "I'm the bread of life, the bread that's come down from heaven. I'm the nourishment that your soul needs."

So we were meant, just like we are meant to run after food for our bodily sustenance, our souls live off of God, the presence and word and voice of God in our life. His spiritual reality is kind of our food. And so our souls are starving actually for his word, his voice, his truth, his presence in our life.

And just like we have regular meals, we need regularly to go to our Father and to draw in, eat and imbibe, drink in the resources of the word of God. There's a reason the Psalms call the Word of God like honey, as sweeter than honey to my lips. What is that? I delight in your word. I'm hungry for it like my soul longs for you like a parched deer in the desert. What is that? That's all appetite language.

In other words, we're meant to feast and to drink deep of the word of God. So that's what we do. We pause, we slow down, we say no to food so we can say yes to feasting on the word of God, abiding in his presence, drinking in the resources of who he is for us in Jesus Christ. And if we don't do that, it's not going to happen.

No one in our life is going to say slow down and attend to your soul, only the still small voice of God beckoning us to come, to come away, to get still and quiet, to seek his face. But he promises if we seek his face, if we pursue him, he will meet us in those spaces. And that's what our souls are crying out for. So fasting really is an invitation to live, to abundant life, to attend to the spiritual side of our souls.

Larry McCarthy: Our prayer, our hope for you today is that we've stirred up your appetite for the word of God. In earnest beloved, we're asking, are you spiritually malnourished? Well, get refreshed, get filled up on God's Word.

Now to help you counter the false teaching and confusion in our culture, we want to send you Pastor Erwin Lutzer's book, Christ Among Other Gods. And don't forget, during this critical month of August, your gift of any amount will be doubled, dollar for dollar, making double the impact as we spread gospel truth.

Thank you for partnering with us with your prayers and with your gifts. Now, simply go to livinghopeoffer.com or call us at 1-800-215-5001. That's livinghopeoffer.com, 1-800-215-5001. You can also write to us at Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614. That's Moody Church Media, 1635 North LaSalle Drive, Chicago, Illinois, 60614.

You know beloved, we've been discussing fasting, and I'm reminded that this isn't just a helpful spiritual exercise. It actually gives the Holy Spirit room to form the very character of Jesus within us. And next time, we'll talk about how fasting makes us more like Christ. Thanks for joining us for Living Hope, where you'll always find gospel truth for the journey of a lifetime. Living Hope is a production of Moody Church Media and is sponsored by the Moody Church.