A Hunger for God Post 5 of 7 | Fasting for the King's Coming
This is a special City Notes for Emmaus City Church in relation to fasting from the book, A Hunger for God. Here are some previous reflections:
Post 2 of 7 | New Fasting for New Wine
Post 3 of 7 | The Desert Feast of Fasting
Post 4 of 7 | Fasting for the Reward of the Father
5-Minute Reflection
"Anna ... never left the temple, serving night and day with fastings and prayers. ... She began giving thanks to God, and continued to speak of him to all those who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem." – Matthew 6:16-18, RSV
"Do you love the Lord's appearing? Then you will bend every effort to take the gospel into all the world. It troubles me in the light of the clear teaching of God's Word, in the light of our Lord's explicit definition of our task in The Great Commission, that we take it so lightly. ... His is the kingdom; He reigns in heaven, and He manifests His reign on earth in and through His church. When we have accomplished our mission, He will return and establish His kingdom in glory. To us it is given not only to wait for but also to hasten the coming of the day of God." – pg. 82, George Ladd, The Gospel of the Kingdom
Fasting is a physical expression of heart-hunger for the coming of Jesus.
"Fasting is a future-oriented counterpart to the past-oriented celebration of the Lord's Supper. Jesus said, 'Do this in remembrance of me' (Luke 22:19). By eating we remember the past and say, Jesus has come. He has died for our sins. He has risen from the dead. Our guilt is removed. Our sin is forgiven. Our condemnation and punishment have been transformed to Christ. Our acquittal is sealed. Our reconciliation with God is accomplished. Our bondage to sin is broken. Our enemy has been put to naught. The sting of death is removed. The Lord has come! Let us feast on these great realities and establish our souls on the great foundation of God's grace in the death and resurrection of Christ. That is what we say in our eating of the Lord's Supper. But by not eating – by fasting – we look to the future with an aching in our hearts saying: 'Yes, he came. And yes, what he did for us is glorious. But precisely because of what we have seen and what we have tasted, we feel keenly his absence as well as his presence. The Bridegroom has gone away. He is not here. He was here, and he loves us to the uttermost. And we can eat and even celebrate with fasting because he has come. But this we also know: he is not here the way he once was. As Paul said, 'While we are at home in this body we are absent from the Lord.' And his absence is painful. The sin and misery of the world is painful. The people of Christ are weak and despised – like sheep in the midst of wolves (Matthew 10:16). We long for him to come again and take up his throne and reign in our midst and vindicate his people and his truth and his glory." – pgs. 83-84
"Fasting poses the question: do we miss him? How hungry are we for him to come? The almost universal absence of regular fasting for the Lord's return is a witness to our satisfaction with the presence of the world and the absence of the Lord. ... This is what is missing in the comfortable Christian Church of the modern world. Where in the West do Christians cry to Christ day and night that he would come and bring about justice for his people? Where is there that kind of longing and aching for the consummation of the kingdom? It is no surprise then, that the question of fasting for the coming of the Bridegroom is scarcely asked. If the cry itself is not there, why would one even think of expressing it with fasting?" – pgs. 84-85
"What was the cry of the early church? The cry of the early church was, 'Come, Lord Jesus!' It is no mere coincidence that the very last words of the Bible are first the words of the Lord, 'Yes, I am coming quickly,' and then the response of the church: 'Amen. Come, Lord Jesus' (Revelation 22:20). This is the cry that the whole Bible is meant to leave in the hearts of God's people. One of the few Aramaic words that the first-century Greek-speaking church preserved from the treasured language of Jesus and his earliest followers was the word Maranatha. In 1 Corinthians 16:22 Paul closes his letter by saying, 'If anyone does not love the Lord, let him be accursed. Maranatha.' The word means, 'Our Lord, come!' There is little doubt that the word was preserved in its original Aramaic for the same reason 'Amen' has been preserved in its Hebrew form without change in almost every language of the world: it was a constantly used form. 'Maranatha' was the ever-present heart-cry of the early church. 'O Lord, come!' ... The Bridegroom left on a journey just before the wedding and the Bride cannot act as if things are normal. If she loves him, she will ache for his return." – pgs. 85-86
"God gave a special glimpse of the King's glory to those who were yearning and longing and looking for 'the redemption of Jerusalem.' For Anna that yearning meant a life of fasting and praying, decade after decade – probably sixty years since her husband died – as she ministered in the temple. ... How does our situation compare to Anna's? Her hopes were based on the promises of God like ours are. But oh, how much more we have seen than she had seen. How much more of the Messiah we know and can hope for! She had never seen the years of compassion and power as we have. She had never heard the words of authority and wisdom and love as we have. She never saw the blind receive their sight and the lame walk and the lepers cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead raised and the poor evanglized the way Jesus did it. She never saw him consecrate himself in Gethsemane, or be crucified for our sakes on Golgotha. She never heard the merciful words, 'Today you will be with me in Paradise,' or the triumphant words, 'It is finished.' She never saw him risen from the dead triumphant over sin and death and hell. And yet from what she knew of him in the Old Testament, she yearned for him and fasted with prayers night and day awaiting 'the redemption of Israel.' ... Shall we long for him less than Anna longed for him? Does the fact that we have watched him live and love for three years and even now have his Spirit – does this make us feel Anna's longing less or more?" – pgs. 88-89
"God gave a special glimpse of the King's glory to those who were yearning and longing and looking for 'the redemption of Jerusalem.' For Anna that yearning meant a life of fasting and praying, decade after decade – probably sixty years since her husband died – as she ministered in the temple. ... How does our situation compare to Anna's? Her hopes were based on the promises of God like ours are. But oh, how much more we have seen than she had seen. How much more of the Messiah we know and can hope for! She had never seen the years of compassion and power as we have. She had never heard the words of authority and wisdom and love as we have. She never saw the blind receive their sight and the lame walk and the lepers cleansed and the deaf hear and the dead raised and the poor evanglized the way Jesus did it. She never saw him consecrate himself in Gethsemane, or be crucified for our sakes on Golgotha. She never heard the merciful words, 'Today you will be with me in Paradise,' or the triumphant words, 'It is finished.' She never saw him risen from the dead triumphant over sin and death and hell. And yet from what she knew of him in the Old Testament, she yearned for him and fasted with prayers night and day awaiting 'the redemption of Israel.' ... Shall we long for him less than Anna longed for him? Does the fact that we have watched him live and love for three years and even now have his Spirit – does this make us feel Anna's longing less or more?" – pgs. 88-89
"One of the great effects of fasting is that it assists what it expresses. ... We love him and long for him. And then fasting rises up as a way of saying earnestly with our whole body what our hearts feel: I hunger for you, O God. ... the very nature of fasting makes it an assistant to this hunger for God. The reason is that hunger for God is spiritual, not physical. And we are less sensitive to spiritual appetites when we are in the bondage of physical ones. ... fasting is way of awakening us to latent spiritual appetites by pushing the domination of physical forces from the center of our lives. John Wesley expressed, ' ... a perpetual reason for fasting: to remove the food of lust and sensuality, to withdraw the incentives of foolish and hurtful desires, of vile and vain affection.' ... Together with Wesley I simply mean to say that most of us run the risk of being overly 'sensualized' simply by having every craving satisfied and rarely pausing in a moment of self-denial to discover if there are alive within us spiritual appetites that could satisfy us at a much deeper level than food, and that are designed for the honor of God. Such is the appetite for the coming of King Jesus." – pgs. 89-91
" ... the early Christians recalled the words of Jesus that we are to 'be like men who are waiting for their master' – and such a Servant-master as this! It is a different image than the Bridegroom, but no less evocative of joy. So they believed that the second coming of Jesus, no matter what suffering they have to go through, would be an all-recompensing experience of joy and exultation. 'To the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing; so that also at the revelation of His glory, you may rejoice with exultation' (1 Peter 4:13). This hope was so dominant for the early Christians that all of life was lived as the life of an exile. This did not mean they had no concern for the welfare of their neighbors. On the contrary, it was the lavish freedom from the love of things that gave them the liberty to love their neighbors with abandon. And this freedom came from their otherworldly hope. The sacrificial love of believers for their neighbors was the evidence that their hope came from outside this world order (Colossians 1:4-5; Hebrews 10:32-34). Their common confession was, 'here we have no lasting city' (Hebrews 13:14). We are 'aliens and strangers' (1 Peter 2:11). And this meant that the great, joyful, love-sustaining expectation was the coming of their king: 'Our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ' (Philippians 3:20)." – pgs. 91-92
"The 'eager waiting' of the early church for her Bridegroom to come explains why she prayed the way she did. You can't really long for something as intensely as she longed for Christ and not cry out to God. So she cried out and prayed, 'Lord, thy kingdom come!' 'Maranatha!' 'Come, Lord Jesus!' Surely, this hunger for Christ needs to be restored in the comfortable church of the prosperous West. The absence of fasting is indicative of our comfort with the way things are. No one fasts to express how content they are. People only fast out of dissatisfaction. '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 15:9). The absence of fasting is the measure of our contentment with the absence of Christ. But it would be a great mistake to think that the awakening of desire for the Bridegroom would produce a wave of monastic withdrawal into the fasting and prayer of passive waiting. That is not what the awakening of desire for Christ would produce. It would produce a radical, new commitment to complete the task of world evangelization, no matter what the cost. And fasting would not become a pacifistic discipline for private hopes, but a fearsome missionary weapon in the fight of faith. ... If we really long for Christ to return and the kingdom to come, then we will pour our lives into completing the prerequisite to his coming, namely, Matthew 24:14 – 'This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world for a witness to all the nations, and then the end shall come.' ... there is a direct correlation between loving the Lord's appearing and laboring for the cause of world evangelization. This simply deepens the connection between fasting and the coming of Christ. ... the Bridegroom will not come until the gospel is preached to the nations, and the nations are reached through spiritual breakthroughs that come by fasting and prayer. So there are at least two ways that the Church – the Bride – is to express her longing for the Bridegroom: first by prayer ('Thy kingdom come ... Maranatha ... Come, Lord Jesus!') and second by world evangelization ('This gospel will be preached to all the nations ... and then the end (the Lord!) will come'). And since Jesus said, 'when the Bridegroom is taken away, (we) will fast,' it is not surprising that fasting is connected with precisely these two things in the New Testament: prayer (Luke 2:37; Matthew 6:6-18) and world evanglelization (Acts 13:1-4). Fasting is the exclamation point at the end of 'Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus!' It is the modest, voluntary embracing of what it will cost to finish the Great Commission: pain." – pgs. 92-95
"Let us long for the Lord Jesus and look for him with more intensity than Anna and Simeon. Shall we have less devotion than these pre-Christian saints? We have beheld his glory. Glory as of the only begotten of the Father. And shall we hunger less for his appearing? Are we settled into the world so comfortably that the thought of fasting for the end of history is unthinkable? ... Does Ann's passion for the Messiah appeal to any of us at all? Do we want the appearance of Jesus more than we want to finish our career and family plans? Or our next meal? Should we not fast for the coming of the king? This is not some strange new devotional practice. It is simply saying with our hunger: This much, O Lord, we want your work to be done and your kingdom to come. This much, O Lord, we want you to return!" – pgs. 95-96
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