What does the Bible say about fasting?

• Deuteronomy 9:9, fasting of Moses
• 1 King 19:8, fasting of Elijah
• Esther 4:15–16, Esther asks for all the Jews to fast on her behalf
• Isaiah 58, true and false fasting
• Daniel 10:3, fasting of Daniel
• Joel 2:15, a fast of repentance
• Zechariah 7:5, God rejects hypocritical fasting
• Matthew 4:1–4, Jesus fasts in the wilderness for forty days and nights
• Matthew 6:16, fast in private
• Matthew 9:14–15, a question about fasting
• Luke 18:12, fasting in a parable
• John 4:32–34, Jesus's food is to do God's will
• Acts 9:9, fasting of Paul
• Acts 13:2, the Holy Spirit speaks during a fast
• 1 Corinthians 6:12, all things are lawful, but I will not be dominated by anything 

Sermon ideas about fasting

A voluntary discipline

To the uninitiated, fasting is surprisingly common among the people of God—among them Moses, David, Elijah, Esther, Daniel, Anna, Jesus, and Paul, as well as Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, Charles Finney, and countless others. 

What concepts can a sermon on fasting highlight? First, fasting is distinct from dieting and from hunger strikes. People undertake diets and hunger strikes from various physical and political motives but undertake fasts to turn their hearts toward God. 

Since the body cannot go without water for more than a few days, the fasts conducted by Moses (Deuteronomy 9) and by Elijah (1 Kings 19) would have needed supernatural support. 

Fasting is a voluntary spiritual discipline. There are no commands in the Bible to fast—unlike, for example, the directives to pray or to give generously. But in Matthew 6, Jesus speaks first of giving alms (don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing) and then of prayer (do not pile up empty phrases) and then of fasting (don't look dismal while fasting), as if these are all natural practices for a believer. Jesus treats almsgiving, prayer, and fasting as the same sort of thing: regular spiritual disciplines. And while Jesus does not command fasting, he does in Matthew 9 state an expectation that his disciples will fast after his departure.  

Fasting for freedom? 

A sermon on fasting should teach that a genuine fast is God-centered. The idea is to isolate and celebrate our sheer dependence on God for life itself and to increase our hunger and thirst for God. As the Desert Fathers knew, human appetites are linked. Abandoning gluttony, the Desert Fathers counseled fasting as a deliberate deprivation that would sharpen the hunger for God and the desire to feast on God. "Fasting is feasting," writes Richard J. Foster in Celebration of Discipline. 

Both Foster and Dallas Willard, following centuries of Christian reflection, say that among the spiritual benefits of fasting is that it reveals and breaks down our devotion to food and to other gods. A fast brings to the surface the things that control us and undermines them. Fasting teaches us "how powerful and clever our body is in getting its own way against our stronger resolves," Willard writes in The Spirit of the Disciplines. 

Like every classic spiritual discipline, the goal of fasting is freedom. Discipline is not the enemy of freedom; discipline is the very basis of freedom. Discipline takes aim at our bondage in order to break it. 

When freedom from idolatry arrives, so does a kind of contentment. Our comfort food is now the blessed word of God. And contentment can spread. Foster cites Elizabeth O'Connor, author of Search for Silence, who recounts how fasting both increased her contentment and made her more mindful of the sufferings of Jesus and of hungry people around the world. She began to feel compassion for them and to pray for them. When Christians fast, their spiritual landscape shifts in healthy directions.