Let us ask what is the use of fasting, for so we shall best come to understand the true methods and degrees of fasting. All bodily discipline, all voluntary abstinence from pleasure of whatever sort, must be of value either as a symbol of something or a means of something. These two functions belong to it as being connected with the body, which is at once the utterer and the educator of the soul within. No man can be a better man save as his pride is crushed into repentance, and as the sweltering, enwrapping mass of passions and indulgences that is around him is broken through, so that God can find his soul and pour Himself into it. This, then, is the philosophy of fasting. It expresses repentance, and it uncovers the life to God. It is the voluntary disuse of anything innocent in itself, with a view to spiritual culture.
I. Consider first the value of fasting as a symbol. It expresses the abandonment of pride. But it is the characteristic of a symbolic action that it not merely expresses but increases and nourishes the feeling to which it corresponds. And if abstinence is the sign of humility, it is natural enough that as the life abstains from its ordinary indulgences the humiliation which is so expressed should be deepened by the expression. Thus the symbol becomes also a means.
II. Note the second value of fasting its value directly as a means. The more we watch the lives of men, the more we see that one of the reasons why men are not occupied with great thoughts and interests is the way in which their lives are overfilled with little things. The real Lent is the putting forth of a man's hand to quiet his own passions and to push them aside, that the higher voices may speak to him and the higher touches fall upon him. It is the making of an emptiness about the soul, that the higher fulness may fill it. Perhaps some day the lower needs may themselves become, and dignify themselves by becoming, the meek interpreters and ministers of those very powers which they once shut out from the soul. There will be no fasting days, no Lent, in heaven. Not because we shall have no bodies there, but because our bodies there will be open to God, the helps and not the hindrances of spiritual communication to our souls.
Phillips Brooks, The Candle of the Lord,p. 200.
Properly speaking, fasting is not so much a duty enjoined by revelation as it is the natural expression of certain religious feelings and desires. There is but one special fast ordained in the Old Testament, and there is none at all ordained in the New. Yet one cannot fail to see that the exercise is nevertheless quite in accordance with the whole tenour of a true religious life of all ages; and that, if it is not expressly commanded, it is only because nature itself teaches us in certain circumstances thus to afflict the soul. These circumstances which would obviously suggest this exercise are twofold.
I. Fasting is the natural expression of grief, and therefore the natural accompaniment of godly sorrow. It is a mistaken kindness to press dainties on the heart when it has no appetite for aught but its sorrow. Better let it have its fill of grief better every way for body and mind. Spiritual sorrow in the same way suggests, and is the better for, this exercise of fasting.
II. Fasting is also a wise method of keeping down the law of the flesh which is in our members. Rich and poor will be the better for a fast now and then, to mortify the flesh, to weaken the incentives to evil, to subdue in some measure the carnal nature, and give freer play and power to the spiritual man within.
III. Our Lord counsels His people, (1) that their fasting must be real, sincere, genuine a thing to be seen, not of men, but of God; (2) that fasting in the Christian Church should be altogether private, and even secret, not only not in order to be seen of men, but absolutely hidden from them. Religion does not consist in a sour visage or morose habit nay, more, religion is not properly a sorrowful thing. The Gospel was not sad tidings, but glad tidings for all mankind, and we are not acting fairly by it unless we strive so to present it, in all its winning and attractive beauty, that men shall be led to seek after Jesus. Christianity has its godly sorrow, has its heart-grief for sin, has its fasting and mortifying of the flesh; yet we do it utter injustice unless we also make it appear that it is, taken as a whole, the only true blessedness and peace and joy, the only walk with God which is gladness everlasting.
W. C. Smith, The Sermon on the Mount,p. 193.
Reference: Matthew 6:16. H. J. Wilmot-Buxton, The Life of Duty,vol. i., p. 133.Matthew 6:16-18. J. Oswald Dykes, The Laws of the Kingdom,p. 219; C. Girdlestone, A Course of Sermons,vol. i., p. 263.Matthew 6:16-21. Homiletic Quarterly,vol. i., p. 57; Clergyman's Magazine,vol. ii., p. 94.Matthew 6:17. J. M. Neale, Sermons in Sackville College,vol. i., p. 141.Matthew 6:17; Matthew 6:18. E. Blencowe, Plain Sermons to a Country Congregation,vol. ii., p. 131.