2025
When You Fast
Passage: Matthew 6:16-18; Matthew 5:6; Psalm 63:1-5
“I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion…When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.” —Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
“Fasting is one of the most essential and powerful of all the practices of Jesus and, arguably, the single most neglected in the modern Western church.” —John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:
This week we started a new sermon series Trellis & Vine: Habits of Healthy Christian. In this series, we are considering the practices below.
- Silence and solitude to pray
- Fasting to pray
- Listening to God’s word
- Community in small groups & friendships
- Community in sabbath & corporate worship
- Generosity with money
- Generosity with time
Sermon Outline:
- What is fasting?
- Why we fast?
- How to fast?
What is your first impression of fasting? Does your experience with fasting relate to diet or religion or something else?
How would you define or explain fasting to someone who does not know what it is?
Read Matthew 6:16-18. What challenges, encourages, or sparks questions for you in this passage? What phrases stand out to you that help shape your understanding of God’s character and your identity as a child of God?
The Bible references fasting around 80 times, always in relation to abstaining from food for a set time to pray. In Practicing the Way, John Mark Comer defines fasting as, “literally praying with your body, offering all that you are to God in worship. As you yield your body to God, you are breaking the power of the flesh to control you and opening up to the power of the Spirit in its place.” In what ways does this definition encourage or challenge your understanding of fasting?
Consider the reasons to fast below. In what ways do these reasons help motivate you to fast? What is the difference between being motivated by God’s grace vs religion?
- Remember we are not God
- Pursue God more than sin
- Love of neighbor
- Because of God’s grace
How have you practiced fasting? What has it looked like practically and felt like? How has community been a part of your fasting?
What does it look like for you to “remember the end of fasting”? Read Psalm 63:5 and Revelation 19:7, 9. What is the relationship between fasting and feating and being satisfied?
What from these passages and this discussion is something you want to put into practice or be more aware of this week?
PRAYER
Share with your group how they can be praying for you: what is weighing on you from this past week? What are you praising God for from this past week?
John 15:5 / “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.”