Tony Evans - Does Fasting Really Work?
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Summary
In this message from Isaiah 58—the longest biblical passage on fasting—the preacher emphasizes that God desires a true fast marked by genuine repentance and humility, not mere religious ritual or self-centered motives. The people were fasting yet wondering why God wasn’t responding, because their fasts prioritized personal desires over spiritual brokenness and obedience. The key takeaway is that to experience heaven’s intervention, we must first humbly confess and turn from sin, allowing God to cleanse us before He answers our deeper needs.
The Need for Honest Diagnosis
You must be willing to tell the doctor what’s wrong if you want the doctor to make it right. You and I must be willing to tell God what’s wrong with our attitudes, our actions, what we did, and what we said that would block fellowship with Him if we want to hear from heaven. In Isaiah 58, the prophet talks to the children of Israel and speaks to us today about how to sharpen our spiritual acts to get more accomplished. It is the single longest passage in Scripture on fasting.
Fasting Throughout Scripture
The Bible references fasting throughout. In your spiritual guide, I will list a whole set of passages because people fasted for different kinds of situations throughout the Bible. Single people fasted for a mate; when people were in trouble, they fasted for relief from that trouble. All kinds of scenarios called for it, but it was a time when they would set aside the physical in order to gain something more important than the physical. Fasting can be defined as the deliberate abstinence from some form of physical gratification for a period of time in order to achieve a greater spiritual goal.
Fasting for God, Not Self
Zechariah 7, verses 5 and 6, says you fast for God; you eat for yourself. We eat for our physical well-being and nutritional value, but He says when you fast—when you intentionally give up the physical to gain the spiritual—you do that for God. Jesus made the point that in His absence, after His death, resurrection, and ascension, you will fast until He comes again, because if you need something to happen in the physical, you’re going to need to have a sharpened axe in the spiritual. That sharpened axe is when you add fasting to prayer.
The Illustration of the Hungry Baby
I was speaking to a group here recently, and when I spoke to the group, a mother had a baby in her arms. The baby broke up the meeting because it started crying and creating all kinds of distractions. So I’m trying to speak to this group; they’re distracted, and I’m distracted. The baby was hungry and desperate. It’s bad enough if the baby is hungry, but if the baby is hungry and desperate, it can turn a place upside down. The mother, recognizing that there was a big disturbance, tried to pacify the baby. She brought out a pacifier, which I call fake food. A pacifier is designed to shut you up while not benefiting you at all. A pacifier is fake news; it is meant to make you think something is happening because you are performing the duty of sucking and sucking and sucking. Maybe, if you suck hard enough and long enough, you think something is changing in your life. A lot of fake fasting goes on where you can go through the motions to pacify yourself and make yourself think you are spiritual, make you think you’re getting close to God.
Well, the way you know you’ve been pacified is that you’re still hungry. God wants us to be hungry, but He wants us to be hungry for Him. Isaiah writes, and the people had a question in verse three of Isaiah 58: «Why have we fasted and you do not see? Why have we humbled ourselves and you do not notice?» Behold, on the day of your fast, you find your desire. In other words, we come to You, we tell You what we want, we tell You what we need, we give You our desires, and we don’t hear a thing. We’ve done the duty; we’ve done what You’ve asked us to do; we’ve fulfilled what You’ve required, but heaven is not responding. Heaven is not answering us.
The True Purpose of Fasting
Fasting is supposed to signify that the spiritual is more important than the physical, that the supernatural is more important than the natural. Fasting says that man does not live by bread alone, that the physical can’t fix this. Fasting indicates that I need a spiritual booster because the vaccine of my normal worship isn’t working. It is to declare that I need heaven more than I need earth. To let You know, God, how serious I am, I will let something on earth go for a period of time because I need something more important from heaven. It is designed to place the spiritual in front of the physical. Of course, Satan wants to flip the script. He wants to make the physical more important than the spiritual because if he can keep you physical, then he can push back the spiritual, which gives you limited access to heaven while increasing access to earth. But since earth is not sufficient, you find yourself limited in what you can achieve from a spiritual perspective.
So they were calling on God; they were going through the motions; they were doing the routine, and the question is raised at the beginning of verse 5: «Is it a fast like this which I choose?» Not the one you want, but the one I choose. In other words, you’ve given it your own definition. You’re doing this your way and not the way that I demand, expect, and require.
Rounding the Bases in God’s Chosen Fast
This leads to an instruction for us and for those of you who will enter into this concept of making this a part of your spiritual discipline, with a day a week or a portion of a day a week, to deal with the deep issues of life and of family that you know you need fasting for because earth was not able to solve it. He gives them a baseball outline. Now, in baseball, there are first base, second base, and third base, and the goal is home plate. Because when you hit home plate, you score, so the idea is to be able to round the bases of fasting, so that when you have completed it, you have scored heaven invading history.
Amen. So, first base, the place that you go first in the fast that He chooses, continuing in verse 5: «Is it for bowing one’s head like a reed, and for spreading out sackcloth and ashes as a bed? Will you call this a fast even an acceptable day to the Lord?» So the first thing you’ve got to do to have an acceptable time, an acceptable concentrated prayer time that includes giving up the physical for the spiritual, is spiritually humbling ourselves before God. He calls it humbling yourself with sackcloth and ashes, which is the posture of repentance. In other words, He says if you want My attention from heaven, you must be willing to address sin in your life. Amen.
Facing Sin Without Camouflage
Sackcloth and ashes, humbling yourself—in other words, you cannot use religious activity as a camouflage for unrighteous activity. We must face our sin if we want to see God’s solutions. If we are not willing to face our sins, not excuse them, but face them, to acknowledge God, the Bible says that the one in Psalm 66:18 who harbors wickedness in his heart will not hear from God. So if you want to hear from God, you must face unrighteousness in your life, or my life, or collectively in our lives. We must not call it a mistake, a bad habit, or «you know, my bad.» We’ve got to call it what God calls it, if God has called it, and God calls it sin when we disobey Him or His word.
So you must face it; humble yourself with sackcloth and ashes. It is the posture of repentance. He says, «This is the day that I approve of, that I accept.» There are probably some people in here who avoid the scale. If someone would ask you, «Have you stepped on the scale lately?» you would say no. There are other people who step on it and lean. One reason that people don’t step on it or step on it and lean is they don’t want to face the truth. They don’t want it to be revealed that they’ve returned to meat and dessert. They don’t want it revealed that the scale is going up and not going down. Thinking that somehow not getting on the scale or leaning on it causes it to lie has changed something.
It is an unwillingness to face reality that keeps us from benefiting. You must be willing to tell the doctor what’s wrong if you want the doctor to make it right. You and I must be willing to tell God what’s wrong with our attitudes, our actions, what we did, and what we said that would block fellowship with Him if we want to hear from Heaven according to Psalm 66:18.
The Mess of Spiritual Remodeling
When you want to remodel something, you’ve got to be willing to tear stuff out, and it gets messy before you can put new stuff in. A lot of us want God to remodel our circumstances when we don’t want Him to tear out our sin. If He’s not free to tear out our unrighteousness, He’s not free to remodel our lives and put them in the order that we need them to be in. Many of us have had colonoscopies. That’s not a fun situation. A colonoscopy is not one of those exams you look forward to, but until the doctor can get rid of the junk, he or she can’t see and remove the polyps that can produce cancer.
So, even though it is an uncomfortable process and an uncomfortable exam, it’s necessary to have a healthy colon and live a cancer-free life from the colon perspective. God is inviting us to spiritual colonoscopies. He’s saying, «I want to cleanse you of sin so that I am free to produce what you need in your life through the fast that I choose, not the one that you want, but the one that I choose.»