Hungry for God: Fasting in Christ’s Kingdom | Matthew 6:16-18
Brian Hedges | March 22, 2026
Let me invite you to turn in Scripture to Matthew 6. We’ll be reading in just a moment from Matthew 6:16-18.
Many of you will know that today is the fourth Sunday of Lent; and Lent, as most of you know, is that forty-day period leading up to Easter that historically has been marked by focused attention on repentance, prayer, and fasting.
Now, I know that many of us as Protestants sometimes assume that Lent is simply a Roman Catholic thing, but the practices of Lent actually predate the medieval Roman Catholic church by hundreds of years. In fact, even in the fourth century, by the time of the Council of Nicaea, the church was giving instruction for the recognition of this time of fasting and prayer leading up to Passover, to Easter, in the life of the church.
But I mention Lent this morning not mainly because we are in that season, but because the season of Lent is a season of fasting, and because the passage that we’re going to read this morning contains some of Jesus’ teaching on fasting.
We are continuing in this series in the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, today is the last day in our current section, and we’ll take a brief break for the next several weeks. But we have been seeing that the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ manifesto of the kingdom of God. It’s all about Jesus’ teaching about what life in the kingdom of God is like, and how those who are citizens of the kingdom, they are heirs of the kingdom, are to have a righteousness that is greater than the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees. And throughout this teaching, Jesus has been showing that this greater righteousness is to be characterized not just by external conformity to religion but by hearts that love and are devoted to the Father. That leads to transformation in our character.
In Matthew 6, Jesus has taken three core practices that really were the pillars of Judaism: the practices of almsgiving, of prayer, and (today) of fasting. In each case, Jesus shows that the issue is not just what you do, it’s why you do it; it’s motivation. He corrects those who do these things in order to be seen by others and instead calls us to practice our righteousness in secret, knowing that the Father who sees in secret will reward us.
So today, we come to the last of these three examples, the example of fasting. You have it in Matthew 6:16-18. I want to read this passage and then consider the issue of fasting, not only what Jesus says here, but also more broadly, some of the biblical teaching on fasting. And I want to try to make this as practical as possible and call us to some kind of renewal of this practice.
Now, I know some of you, your stomachs are already growling; you’re ready for lunch. Maybe the last thing you want to hear this morning is a sermon on fasting, but be patient. This is the word of God; let’s hear the word of God, and let’s ask what God would have us to do in response to his word this morning. Let’s read the text, just three verses, Matthew 6:16-18. Jesus says,
“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”
This is God’s Word.
As with giving and prayer, the question for believers is not, “Should Christians fast?” because Jesus assumes that we will. He says, “When you fast,” not, “If you fast.” The question isn’t should we fast or not; rather the questions we want to answer this morning are three:
1. What Is Fasting?
2. Why Does It Matter?
3. How Do We Practice It?
So let’s just work through those one at a time.
1. What Is Fasting?
We’ll kind of start with some definitions. We can say the most basic definition is this, that fasting is the spiritual practice of abstaining from food for the purpose of prayer. It’s abstaining from food for the purpose of prayer or for seeking God.
Don Whitney, in his excellent book on the spiritual disciplines, has said that “fasting is the most feared and misunderstood of all the spiritual disciplines.” He may be right, because I do think fasting is one of those spiritual disciplines that’s a little bit less glamorous for us, it’s a little less attractive to us. You know, as good Protestants, we’re all about reading the Bible, we even care about prayer. But my guess is that most of us have not given as much attention to fasting.
There are a number of reasons for that. I think sometimes we avoid fasting because we feel intimidated by it. That feels overwhelming for us, to think about actually giving up food in order to seek God. How would we even go about that? Maybe that’s good for missionaries or for monks or for nuns in a convent, but is that really something that the everyday Christian should do?
Fasting is also inconvenient. It disrupts our routines. We may also avoid fasting because we fear the excesses of legalism and of religion, which isn’t really focusing the heart on God. And we know that fasting can be and has been abused.
But perhaps the deepest reason why we avoid fasting is because fasting exposes something in our hearts. The very inconvenience of fasting and the discomfort of giving up food reveals just the hold that food has on us. And we all know this. If you’ve ever fasted at all, even if it wasn’t for a religious purpose—maybe you had to fast prior to a medical procedure, or maybe you had to just skip lunch because you were too busy at work—you know what it’s like when those hunger pains start, and you start to get kind of grumpy, and you just want something to eat because it’ll be a comfort to you. So you find yourself distracted and irritable and uncomfortable. It reveals something, not just about fasting, but it reveals something about the heart. It reveals something about the dependence, the over-dependence we have on the creature comforts of this world, rather than depending on God himself.
So at the most basic level, fasting is abstinence from food, but fasting’s been done for many different purposes. Many people do it for purely religious reasons, but maybe not even with a focus on God, and that’s what Jesus corrects in this passage, those who fast in the name of religion, but they’re really doing it for show and to be seen by others. They’re doing it for their reputation, not for communion with God.
There are others who have fasted for political purposes. You might think of Gandhi and some of his extensive fasts in political protest. And some, of course, fast for health—think of the many books on intermittent fasting and so on.
So it’s possible to fast—that is, skip food, skip a meal—and not do it for any real spiritual purpose or benefit. So our definition has to include this element of seeking God.
Here’s a little more detailed definition. This is from Adele Calhoun’s Spiritual Disciplines Handbook. She says, “Fasting is the self-denial of normal necessities in order to intentionally attend to God in prayer.”
“Fasting is the self-denial of normal necessities in order to intentionally attend to God in prayer.”
So that’s helpful. Fasting is one of the ways in which we practically obey Jesus’ call to deny ourselves. It is a practice of self-denial when we abstain from food, but we do it with a spiritual purpose: to seek the Lord, to intentionally set our attention and our focus on God.
I think we could also extend that definition to include giving up other things. That’s not the focus of Jesus here, but many people writing about fasting, I think, have appropriately seen the application of the principles of fasting to other things in our lives. So Martyn Lloyd-Jones, in his studies on the Sermon on the Mount, suggests that fasting should be made to include abstinence from anything which is legitimate in and of itself for the sake of some spiritual purpose. And Adele Calhoun agrees. She says,
“Fasting is an opportunity to lay down an appetite—an appetite for food, for media, for shopping. This act of self-denial may not seem huge (it’s just a meal or a trip to the mall), but it brings us face to face with the hunger at the core of our being.”
So, in application this morning, let me just say, as you think about fasting, don’t limit it to food. I am going to call us to do something specific in relation to food. But some of you maybe are not able to fast from food for health or medical reasons, and all of us probably need to think of other things in our lives that maybe we should give up for a season. Maybe we give up for a day or for a week or for a month. So think about the application of these principles to things like TV or your phone or social media or gaming or shopping or some other normal comfort in life—giving it up in order to more earnestly seek God. That’s what fasting is. That’s what the Scriptures call us to do on occasion.
2. Why Does It Matter?
But I think understanding it’s not enough. We actually need to practice it, and to do that, we have to be motivated rightly. So that leads to the second question: why does fasting matter? Why does it matter?
(1) The first thing to say is that not all fasting is good and noble. In fact, the emphasis of Jesus in this passage is a warning. He is warning people to not fast like the hypocrites do. He says, “Don’t look gloomy like the hypocrites, that their fasting may be seen by others.” So he’s showing us right here that fasting can go wrong. When you do fasting for the sake of appearance, when you do it for recognition, you do it just for yourself, you do it to impress others; when you do that, the fasting is actually doing you spiritual harm, not spiritual good.
Jesus even tells a story that kind of gives an illustration of this. Do you remember this story in Luke 18? He talks about two men who went to the temple to pray. One of them was a very, very religious guy. He was a Pharisee. And he went to the temple to pray, and he prayed kind of to himself. He’s really speaking to himself, and he thanks God for all the good things in his life. He thanks God that he’s not like other people, he’s not like a tax collector over here, he’s not a cheater, he’s not a sinner, he’s not an adulterer. He thanks God that he fasts twice a week, that he gives tithes of all that he possesses. He thanks God that he’s not like other men.
In contrast to him, Jesus also talks about this tax collector. Here’s one of the most despised people of society at that time. He’s conscious of his sins, he’s conscious of his guilt. He comes to the temple. He’s so ashamed he cannot even lift up his face, but he beats on his chest, and he says, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” And Jesus says that’s the man who went down to his house justified, not the religious Pharisee with all of his fasting and prayer.
So be careful when you think about fasting. If you think that fasting is going to make you more righteous, that fasting is going to give you brownie points with God, that fasting is somehow going to merit something from God, that’s the wrong approach to fasting. It’s not what fasting is for. We need to beware of fasting for the wrong reason.
(2) Nevertheless, with that warning in place, we need to know that fasting is commended in the Scriptures. You find this in both the Old Testament and in the New.
Now, I’m not just going to give you a long list of passages. Let it suffice to say that the Old Testament Scriptures are full of examples of people who fast because they are mourning for their sins or because they are mourning because of some urgent need in the nation. Maybe they are facing the judgment of God, and so they fast and pray. You find people fasting both individually and fasting corporately, the whole people of God fasting together.
Jesus himself fasted. Do you remember that Jesus, when he had been baptized in the Jordan River, was immediately driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he spent forty days in fasting and in prayer? So Jesus began his earthly ministry with a period of fasting.
The apostle Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11 that he was “in fastings often.” That may have been because he simply didn’t have enough food to eat and was often in such desperate need. Nevertheless, he spent much time in fasting. And we know that the early church spent time in fasting, and you have that recorded in the book of Acts; for example, in Acts 13.
Throughout the history of the church, Christians who have been serious about their faith have practiced fasting. So fasting is commended in the Scriptures.
(3) What is the purpose of fasting? At its heart, I think we can say that fasting is about desire, because fasting is a spiritual practice where we give up something (like food), something that we desire on a natural level, in order to focus and train our desires upon God. And when we do that, fasting exposes us. It exposes what we depend upon, it exposes the idols of our hearts. Fasting gets into the hearts and shows us our deeper need for God.
Let me give you a quote from John Piper. This is from John Piper’s excellent book on fasting called A Hunger for God: Desiring God Through Fasting and Prayer. Piper gives a rationale for fasting in this statement. He says,
“The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison, but apple pie. It’s not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies, but his gifts.”
I think Piper’s right. I think it is true that oftentimes the things that pull us away from God, that dull the edge of our appetite for God and for spiritual reality—it’s not the bad things, it’s the good things that we have elevated into too high of a place.
Fasting is designed to interrupt that. Fasting is a spiritual discipline of self-denial that is meant to interrupt that normal course of our lives and of our appetites so that we begin to feel hunger, we begin to feel discomfort, we begin to feel our need, and we begin to ask the question, “What do I turn to when I feel empty or when I feel unhappy? Do I turn to food or to entertainment or to my phone, or whatever it is?” Fasting shows you what you actually run to when life is hard. Most of us never notice it because we don’t allow ourselves to slow down long enough to feel it or to notice it, but fasting interrupts that routine and helps bring the idols of our hearts to the surface.
In doing so, it shows us—if we will let it and if we will see God—it shows us that God is sufficient, that God is enough, and that God can sustain us.
3. How Do We Practice It?
So then, how are we to do this? How do we practice fasting? I want to just be real practical here, okay? This doesn’t take a long time to say, but I want to just give you three guidelines for fasting and then call you to something very specific, a very clear takeaway that I want to encourage each one of us to do. So how do we practice fasting? Here’s the guidelines.
(1) First of all, start small. Start small by just skipping one meal. Just skip one meal. Don’t try to do a three-day fast if you’ve never fasted before. Don’t try to do something heroic like a forty-day fast. Just skip a meal. It’s not an extreme commitment. It’s a fairly easy thing to do.
(2) When you do so, replace it, don’t just remove it. Replace it with something that will help you to seek the Lord. In other words, if you decide to skip lunch one day, don’t just work through lunch. Instead, take your lunch hour, take your lunch break, go to the park, and spend that time walking and praying and seeking the Lord. Or maybe you just close the door to your office and you pull the shade and you open your Bible and you spend some time in prayer.
(3) You find a way in your fast to give more direct, focused attention on the Lord, and then in doing so, you let your hunger point you to God. Because you’re going to feel hunger. If you’re not used to doing this, you’re going to feel some discomfort. You’re going to probably feel a little bit irritable, a little bit grumpy. When you begin to feel the hunger pangs, when you begin to feel that irritability, let that be a reminder to you that you need something more than food. You need God.
So here’s one simple, clear takeaway. This is what I want to call us to, and I actually am asking us to do this as a church. I want to encourage you sometime in the next two weeks, between now and Easter Sunday, which is two weeks from today, I want to encourage you to just skip one meal and use that time to seek the Lord. Okay?
So that means you look at your calendar and you look at the next two weeks and you try to pick the day that is going to work best and go ahead and schedule that.
Now listen, don’t come tell me that you did it. You’ll ruin it! Don’t do a social media post: “Enjoying the day seeking the Lord as I fast from my lunch or fast from coffee for the week.” Don’t do that. Don’t do that! You miss the whole point of what Jesus is saying.
You’re not doing this to impress me. You’re not doing this to impress anybody else. You’re not doing this to talk to other people about how wonderful it was. That’s not the point. The point is for you with the Lord to deny yourself something that generally is a source of comfort and to let the discomfort you feel, as minor as it may be, let that point you to your need for God. I’m encouraging you to do that. I’d like for us to do that together.
Listen, if you’re not able to—if you’re pregnant or you have a medical condition that keeps you from being able to fast or there’s some other reason why fasting from food may not be the best thing—then fast from something else. Turn off your phone for a lengthier period of time or give up some other creature comfort. Maybe give up sugar for that day or just change your diet, but do something that feels like an inconvenience. It is a practice of self-denial. Do something where you feel the inconvenience so that the discomfort that you feel is a prompting to seek the Lord.
Now, I’ve got one other passage of Scripture I want to read that’s also on fasting, and this is from Matthew 9. This is just shortly after Jesus gives the Sermon on the Mount, and you may know that there is something of a controversy in the life of Jesus because of the fasting practices of his disciples, or maybe the lack of fasting practices of his disciples. You see this in Matthew 9:14-17. Let me read it.
“Then the disciples of John came to him, saying, ‘Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not fast?’”
Isn’t that interesting? Jesus had just taught about fasting in the Sermon on the Mount, and the disciples of John, following John, who’s very ascetic, he’s this prophet in the wilderness—and the disciples of John are following John and his ascetic practices, and they’re fasting a lot; but they notice the disciples of Jesus don’t seem to be doing this, and so they come to Jesus, they ask a question. Maybe it’s just that Jesus’ disciples had really taken him at his word and quit talking about it. Maybe they just weren’t publicizing it anymore. But it does seem that something was unique, something was different because of the way Jesus answers. They ask about this. “Why are your disciples not fasting?”
Listen to what Jesus says. It tells us something important about Jesus and about the kingdom. “Jesus said to them,” verse 15, “‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.’”
Jesus is the bridegroom. The bridegroom is here, and so the disciples aren’t fasting. This is time for celebration because the bridegroom is here! But Jesus says, “When the bridegroom is taken away, then they will fast.”
Then he gives this illustration, verses 16-17.
“No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment, for the patch tears away from the garment, and a worse tear is made. Neither is new wine put into old wineskins. If it is, the skins burst and the wine is spilled and the skins are destroyed. But new wine is put into fresh wineskins, and so both are preserved.”
I think Jesus, in those illustrations, is essentially comparing the new wine of the kingdom—he’s comparing the kingdom of God that is present in his life and ministry, he’s comparing that to new wine, to this new piece of cloth, in contrast to the old forms of religious practice in the old covenant. And he’s saying, “The reason why things are different with me and my disciples is because the bridegroom is here, the new wine of the kingdom is here, and it’s not going to fit into the old forms of Judaism. But there is coming a time when the bridegroom is taken away, and then my disciples will fast.”
This is telling us something about Jesus. It’s telling us that Jesus is the bridegroom who has come. And there’s this tension we live with, isn’t there? Christ has come, and he’s brought his kingdom—it’s been inaugurated, it’s here, it’s present among us—but it’s not here in its fullness. The bridegroom has come, but he’s been taken away, and we are waiting for his return.
So it reframes the way we approach fasting. Fasting is not just about grief over sin, it’s not just mourning, but fasting is a desire, it’s a way to focus our desire on Christ himself, the bridegroom. Why should you fast? Because you want Jesus, because you long for the bridegroom, because you think about what the bridegroom has done to lay down his life for his bride, the Church. He wanted you so much that he gave up not just food, he gave up everything for you! And do we want him enough that we’re willing to give up a single meal in order to seek him, to delight in him, to desire him?
You see, when we practice fasting, it is a way for us—if we do so with faith and with the right heart, with the right motive—it is a way for us to say, “I’m giving up my daily bread because Jesus is something better. He is the bread of life, and he is what I hunger for.” That’s the attitude we want when we fast.
Let me conclude with this exhortation from John Piper. I can’t say it any better than he can. I’ve always thought this was a stirring exhortation. This, once again, is from his book A Hunger for God. Let me read this, and let it land on your heart with whatever conviction you need this morning, alright? And then you ask the Lord what he would have you to do. Piper says,
“If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied, it is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great. God did not create you for this. There is an appetite for God, and it can be awakened. I invite you to turn from the dulling effects of food and the dangers of idolatry and to say with some simple fast, ‘This much, oh God, I want you.’”
Let’s pray.
Father, we ask you now to work in our hearts so that, with an understanding of fasting, you would give us the deeper desire not just for a discipline, not just for a practice, but a deeper desire for Christ, who is the bread of life. May we so desire fellowship with Christ that we would not count anything too dear a price to experience that fellowship. Lord, would you work in our hearts so that we begin to see ways in which, perhaps, we have idolized the comforts of this life and of this world and have sought our comfort and our happiness and our daily contentment and satisfaction in those things rather than in Christ himself?
Lord, guard us from the dangers. We don’t want to do this from wrong motives. We don’t want to do this to the neglect of the great gifts that you have given us, including the gifts of food and of celebration. There is a time for feasting. But Lord, neither do we want to neglect your word and neglect what Jesus seems to assume as a basic practice of disciples, and the broader teaching of Scripture, that says that there is a time when the bridegroom is absent and we should fast because we long for Christ.
So, Lord, show each one of us how you would have us to apply this to our hearts and lives. And Lord, in whatever little step of obedience is taken, may the fruit of that in our own experience of fellowship with you and satisfaction in you, may it so touch our hearts that we would see once again that Christ is better than life.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we pray that this table, the sacraments, would be a reminder to us once again that Christ is the bread of life, the one who has given his life for the life of the world, and that Christ is all we need. Help us come with humble hearts, help us come with faith, help us come believing the great truth of the gospel, that Christ is that treasure in the field and it’s worth giving up everything to have that treasure. So draw near to us in these moments, Lord. We pray that you do this in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
