Last week we took a look at fasting as the first thing Jesus did after His baptism, and one of the first things that He addresses the misuse of when He began His ministry. We looked at the need to be as weak as we can be when we go into a trial, because the greater the trial, the more of God’s strength we need rather than our own. We saw that fasting helps us realize that God is unlike the food that He gives us. The more of food that we have the more full we become, but the more of God that we have the hungrier we get for more awareness of His presence in our life. The more satisfied we are in God, the more unsatisfied we are of how much we know Him and how close we are to Him. Fasting reveals again the hunger for God that has been dulled by constantly consuming at the table of our flesh and of the world. Fasting reveals that at our core, we have a hunger that can not be satisfied by anything else besides deep fellowship with Jesus. And that is the aspect of fasting that I want us to see today; fasting puts us in fellowship with Jesus because it is a form of suffering, and fasting puts us in fellowship with others who are suffering. And that makes Philippians 3 a key passage for understanding fasting in the New Testament.
