Drawing Near: Part 4 | Pastor Austin Hix
Jesus assumes His followers will fast. In Matthew 6 He treats fasting the same way He treats giving and prayer: when you do it, do not perform for people; do it in secret before the Father who sees and rewards. Fasting is simply going without food. It has been a normal Christian practice for most of church history and only recently fell out of regular use in the modern Western church. In a culture that meets every craving instantly, fasting trains awareness of what controls us and builds the muscle of resistance. The real reward is not a changed waistline but a changed way of seeing ourselves and a deeper dependence on God.