Discipleship & Spiritual Formation — recovering the discipline the modern church quietly deleted
We have kept most of the disciplines. We still pray, still read, still gather, still give. But somewhere along the way one of them slipped off the list and nobody noticed the gap. Ask the average believer when he last fasted and you will usually get a blank look, a nervous laugh, or a quick redirect to something more comfortable. Fasting has become the discipline we admire in other people and never actually practice ourselves.
This is strange, because Jesus assumed we would do it. He did not treat fasting as an advanced move for spiritual professionals. He treated it as normal Christian equipment — as ordinary as prayer and giving, and He put it in the same breath as both.
Jesus Said “When,” Not “If”
Whenever you fast, do not put on a gloomy face as the hypocrites do… But you, when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face so that your fasting will not be noticed by men, but by your Father who is in secret.
Matthew 6:16-18 (NASB1995)
Read it again slowly. “When you fast.” Not if. In the same sermon, He said “when you pray” and “when you give.” He grouped all three together and assumed His followers would practice all three. Somewhere between the Sermon on the Mount and now, we quietly demoted one of them to optional. We did not decide fasting was wrong. We just decided we were hungry.
What Fasting Actually Is
Fasting is not a hunger strike aimed at God, as if going without food could pressure heaven into acting. It is not a diet with a religious label. And it is certainly not a way to earn points. Fasting is the deliberate emptying of something good in order to make room for something better — a bodily confession that says, out loud and in the stomach, that man does not live by bread alone.
That is the exact lesson Jesus lived in the wilderness. Forty days without food, and at the point of deepest hunger, He answered the tempter not with a meal but with a sentence:
Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
Matthew 4:4 (NASB1995)
Fasting teaches the body what the soul already knows on its good days: that God Himself is the food. An empty stomach becomes a loud and honest prayer. It exposes how much of our peace we had quietly outsourced to comfort, and it hands that dependence back to the only One who can actually hold it.
The Fast God Actually Chooses
But Scripture will not let fasting stay private and self-focused. Through Isaiah, God rebuked a people who fasted religiously while living hard-heartedly — who skipped meals and then went right on grinding down the people around them. He told them the fast He wanted looked different:
Is this not the fast which I choose, To loosen the bonds of wickedness, To undo the bands of the yoke, And to let the oppressed go free… Is it not to divide your bread with the hungry And bring the homeless poor into the house?
Isaiah 58:6-7 (NASB1995)
A true fast bends outward. It softens a man. The point is never the empty plate; the point is the changed heart that gets up from it more merciful, more humble, more free of the things that had a grip on him. If a season of fasting leaves you prouder and harder, you have not fasted — you have merely been hungry with an audience.
Why We Fast: The Bridegroom Is Away
When people asked why His disciples did not fast like everyone else, Jesus gave an answer that reframed the whole practice:
The attendants of the bridegroom cannot mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them, can they? But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.
Matthew 9:15 (NASB1995)
We live in exactly those days. The Bridegroom has ascended, and the church waits for His return. Christian fasting, at its deepest, is a groan of longing — a way of saying with the body what the heart cannot stop feeling: come back. It is homesickness for a Person. Every skipped meal quietly announces that no amount of earthly fullness is the thing our souls are actually after.
That is why the early church fasted at its most important moments. When the Spirit set apart Paul and Barnabas for the mission that would carry the gospel across the world, He did it while the church was doing this very thing:
While they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for Me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.”
Acts 13:2 (NASB1995)
Where to Start
You do not need forty days. You need one honest meal handed back to God. Pick a day. Skip one meal, and in the hour you would have spent eating, do the thing the hunger is meant to drive you to — pray, and mean it. When the emptiness comes, do not silence it with a snack and do not white-knuckle it in your own strength. Let it become a prayer: Lord, You are what I actually need.
“Yet even now,” declares the LORD, “Return to Me with all your heart, And with fasting, weeping and mourning.”
Joel 2:12 (NASB1995)
Keep it hidden, the way Jesus said. No announcements, no gloomy face, no fishing for anyone to notice. The whole reward of fasting is that your Father sees what is done in secret — and that is more than enough.
The Gospel in the Empty Plate
Fasting will never make God love you more. That is the whole freedom of it. Christ already fasted the wilderness you could not survive, already refused the shortcut you would have taken, already lived the perfect dependence you keep failing at — and He did it in your place. You do not fast to be accepted. You fast because you already are, and your soul is finally free to want Him more than it wants comfort.
The discipline we quietly deleted turns out to be one of the most direct paths back to hunger for God Himself. So recover it. Not to impress anyone. Not to earn anything. Just to remind your own body of what your soul was made to feed on.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist