foundation series #22

I’m going to take a break from Nehemiah this week to spend some time elaborating on the concept of a Solemn Assembly. For those of you who weren’t here last week I announced that the Southern Baptist Convention had called churches to participate in what scripture calls a Solemn Assembly; a day of prayer and fasting with an eye toward corporate repentance of sin and humbling ourselves before our God.
I want to continue on in the same direction by looking at the concept of fasting. First, let me say that there is no direct command of God to fast in the scripture. However, there are many examples of fasting both in the old and new Testaments. Where then does the concept come from? I believe that it flows out of the concept of humbling yourself before God which is commanded repeatedly in scripture.

One of the places that it is commanded in the proclamation of the Day of Atonement found Leviticus 23 starting with verse 27: The day of atonement shall be a holy convocation for you, and you shall humble your souls and present an offering by fire to the LORD. 28"You shall not do any work on this same day, for it is a day of atonement, to make atonement on your behalf before the LORD your God. 29"If there is any person who will not humble himself on this same day, he shall be cut off from his people. 30"As for any person who does any work on this same day, that person I will destroy from among his people. 31"You shall do no work at all. It is to be a perpetual statute throughout your generations in all your dwelling places. 32"It is to be a Sabbath of complete rest to you, and you shall humble your souls; on the ninth of the month at evening, from evening until evening you shall keep your Sabbath."

Where does one get the concept of fasting from the concept of humbling? I think the key place is found in Deuteronomy 8 verse 3: He humbled you and let you be hungry.
What we see in this passage is that one of the ways God humbles stiff necked people is by letting them go hungry. It’s not too far of a stretch from that to understand that one of the ways we can demonstrate our humbleness is by causing ourselves to go hungry.

Now the act of fasting is not in and of itself an act of humility. Jesus shows us this in Luke 18 starting with verse 9: And He also told this parable to some people who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and viewed others with contempt: "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and was praying this to himself: 'God, I thank You that I am not like other people: swindlers, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I pay tithes of all that I get. But the tax collector, standing some distance away, was even unwilling to lift up his eyes to heaven, but was beating his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, the sinner!' I tell you, this man went to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted."
The key reason that we are being called to not work and not eat is to be humbled before God. One way to be shown that you were not really a part of Israel was to work when God said not to work because it showed that you were not humble before God therefore you were not a part of the kingdom of God.
This is not some thing that we do for fun. This is not about us and what we want or what we like. It is important that we understand that life is not about us and what we want. Life is not about having fun and enjoying yourself. Life, real life, is about dying to the rebellion in your heart and submitting yourself in every way to God.

The gospel is not some lucky charm to keep you from harm so you can live life the way you want to and do what you want. That attitude is what has got our culture in the mess that it is in. The truth is for the most part in this culture we are just selfish little babies with no desire to ever grow up.

The call to a solemn assembly is a call against all of that. Maybe this week you have felt the bristles stick up on the back of your neck at the thought of having to do something against your will. I would encourage you to look a little closer at that what is it telling you about your spiritual condition. Maybe you have already come up with a list of excuses and finagled ways you can get around what has been asked of you. Again I would encourage you to take a closer look at what that is saying about your spiritual condition. There are no rules in scripture to tell us what is or isn’t fasting because fasting isn’t the point, humbleness before God is.

This is no joke. This is no exercise in futility. This is about how serious you are at being humble before God. When push comes to shove what are you willing to give up to follow Jesus? If you’re not willing to give up a little food and some TV watching what does that say about your heart?
I will admit that I am more than a little concerned about this whole process. I’m concerned about what it will reveal of our hearts and our spiritual condition. I’m afraid that we will fail the test. I’m just being honest here. I don’t know how deep our faith goes. Even as I say that I realize that I’m showing my own lack of faith in what God can do. What have we seen him do here? Has there been in any lasting change in our lives? Are you any different today than you were last year? Are you closer to God? Are you seeing your families change? Has anything changed at all?

I don’t know about you but I’m tired of the status quo. I don’t want my life to stay this way for the rest of my years. I don’t want to have to wonder if my children are believers or not. I don’t want to wonder if people ever really change or not. I want to see God move in my life and in my family’s life. I want the power of God to be displayed among his people once again – That may be something that NONE of us has ever seen. I’m not talking about some so called Holy Spirit thing or a revival where you get all excited for a couple weeks and then things go back to the way the used to be. I want to see real change, real growth, right here right now and for me that is what this call is all about.
God is not changing us because for the most part we do not want to change. We have no desire to stop rebelling because we think it is no big deal. I am here today to tell you that you don’t know what the power of God looks like. You don’t know what God manifesting him self in our presence looks like because none of us has ever experienced it. I’m not saying we’re not saved I’m saying that we’re newborns in the faith. We’re babies and we want to stay babies and I say that for the church in America as a whole. We like being children. We like not having responsibility. We just want Jesus to be like Calgon and come take us away. But God has called us to be disciples. He has called us to grow up.
I want to relay a story I heard, not because it is written from a Christian perspective but because it shows the heart of a child and the results of discipline on a child’s life.
A mother was teaching her daughter to play a piano piece called "The Little White Donkey" by the French composer Jacques Ibert. The piece is really cute—you can just imagine a little donkey ambling along a country road with its master—but it's also incredibly difficult for young players because the two hands have to keep schizophrenically different rhythms.
The child couldn't do it. The mother and daughter worked on it nonstop for a week, drilling each of her hands separately, over and over. But whenever the child tried putting the hands together, one always morphed into the other, and everything fell apart. Finally, the day before her lesson, the child announced in exasperation that she was giving up and stomped off. "Get back to the piano now," The mother ordered. "You can't make me." "Oh yes, I can." Back at the piano, the daughter made the mother pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. The mother taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then she hauled the child’s dollhouse to the car and told her she would donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if the child didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When the child said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" The mother threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When the child still kept playing it wrong, the mother told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. The mother told the child to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.
The mother rolled up her sleeves and went back to the Piano bench. She used every weapon and tactic she could think of. The two worked right through dinner into the night, and the mother wouldn't let the child get up, not for water, not even to go to the bathroom. The house became a war zone, the mother lost her voice yelling, but still there seemed to be only negative progress, and even the mother began to have doubts.
Then, out of the blue, the child did it. Her hands suddenly came together—her right and left hands each doing their own perfect part—just like that.
The child realized it the same time the mother did. The mother held her breath. The child tried it tentatively again. Then she played it more confidently and faster, and still the rhythm held. A moment later, she was beaming. "Mommy, look—it's easy!" After that, she wanted to play the piece over and over and wouldn't leave the piano. That night, she came to sleep in her mother’s bed, and they snuggled and hugged, cracking each other up. When the child performed "The Little White Donkey" at a recital a few weeks later, parents came up to me and said, "What a perfect piece for your daughter—it's so spunky and so her."
What is the point in all of this? To become a disciple you have to work, but we are all born with a rebellion in our hearts that makes us never want to work on anything accept what we want. We all want to do our own thing. But that is not what God called us to. You see salvation is not about you staying a baby your whole life. God who is a loving father is not going to let you stay a baby. Just like that lady teaching her child to play the piano God is going to do whatever it takes to get you to become a disciple. The goal is to be a mature person just like Jesus. God knows what is best for us and if we are his children then all our fits and screaming and yelling, all of our rebellion will not, cannot stop him from making us disciplined. We can either go easy or hard but if we truly are God’s child we will go. Why? Because a father that loves his child disciplines his child. He doesn’t give them what they want; he gives them what they need.
This concept of fasting and setting aside an entire day for God is meant to bring us a little more into the discipleship of Christ. It’s not about seeing how little you can do and still be accepted it is about humbling yourself before God as an acceptable sacrifice. The call to fast is a call to not eat. Why? So that we will feel hungry for a prolonged amount of time. The hunger is to remind us how much we are to be hungering and thirsting after righteousness and every word that comes from the mouth of God. It is to remind us of where our life comes from and it is not from food; man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.
There is a story in the book of first Samuel chapter 4 that reveals the condition of the church in our day and age and why we need to humble ourselves before God. Israel was at war with the Philistines, much like we are at war with humanists, or liberals or whoever we think isn’t doing things right. 1 The Philistines attacked and defeated the army of Israel, killing 4,000 men. After the battle was over, the troops retreated to their camp, and the elders of Israel asked, “Why did the Lord allow us to be defeated by the Philistines?” Now instead of humbling themselves before God and saying, “Please God deliver us,” they got the bright idea to bring the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord from Shiloh sayin: If we carry it into battle with us, it will save us from our enemies.” What were they doing? They were looking to the form of godliness to save them. They went and got the Ark and came back with two evil sons of Eli who were priests. When all the Israelites saw the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord coming into the camp, their shout of joy was so loud it made the ground shake!
The enemy heard all the excitement and asks: “What’s going on? What’s all the shouting about in the Hebrew camp?” When they were told it was because the Ark of the Lord had arrived, they panicked. “The gods have come into their camp!” they cried. “This is a disaster! We have never had to face anything like this before! Help! Who can save us from these mighty gods of Israel? They are the same gods who destroyed the Egyptians with plagues when Israel was in the wilderness. Fight as never before, Philistines! If you don’t, we will become the Hebrews’ slaves just as they have been ours! Stand up like men and fight!” You see the philistines didn’t run away. The shouts of war in the Israelite camp over an idol only served to make the Philistines fight harder.
So the Philistines fought desperately, and Israel was defeated again. The slaughter was great; 30,000 Israelite soldiers died that day. Let’s put that in perspective, in ONE day the Israelites lost 5 times more men than the US has lost in the entire Iraq/Afganistan war combined. In one day, they lost the equivalent to more than 50% of the entire Vietnam War. We don’t know what blood wars are in our culture. When the killing was done the survivors turned and fled to their tents. The Ark of God was captured, and Hophni and Phinehas, the two sons of Eli, both priests were killed.
A messenger rushed to tell Eli, who was ninety-eight years old and blind, about the loss and the death of his sons. When the messenger mentioned what had happened to the Ark of God, Eli fell backward from his seat beside the gate. He broke his neck and died, for he was old and overweight. He Eli’s daughter in law heard what happened she went into labor and gave birth. She died in childbirth, but before she passed away she named the child Ichabod (which means “Where is the glory?”), for she said, “Israel’s glory is gone.” She named him this because the Ark of God had been captured and because her father-in-law and husband were dead. Then she said, “The glory has departed from Israel, for the Ark of God has been captured.”
My friends, I believe that this is where the church is today- the glory of God has departed. There is too much sin in the church for God to walk in our midst. Saying that reminds me of a passage that is for the most part ignored in our day and age. It is Deuteronomy 23:12-14: "You shall also have a place outside the camp and go out there, and you shall have a spade among your tools, and it shall be when you sit down outside, you shall dig with it and shall turn to cover up your excrement."Since the LORD your God walks in the midst of your camp to deliver you and to defeat your enemies before you, therefore your camp must be holy; and He must not see anything indecent among you or He will turn away from you.

Listen to me: God is not concerned with our poop is he? No. He is concerned about us and he won’t walk in our midst today because we have too much spiritual poop lying around. His glory has departed. The glory has departed because like the Pharisees we clean up the outside maybe we stop cussing, or stop drinking, or stop going here or there but we don’t really do anything about the rebellion that is inside us. We don’t stop rebelling against God and his law.
Until the church humbles itself before God: God will not show up. If you started coming to church because of pain in your life but the only thing that has changed in your life is that you now get up and come to church that is not salvation. That is not change. Until you stop living the way you used to; until you stop rebelling against God in whatever nice and orderly way you rebel against him you will never find the God who is strong enough to save you from yourself.
As long as your stomach, your sports, your job, your life is more important than God, then guess what: You do not have salvation because the first command that leads to salvation is HUMBLE yourself; we also call that repent. I want you to understand that a saved person is not his own, nothing about him is his because he has been bought with the blood of Jesus Christ. YOU HAVE BEEN BOUGHT. You are not your own. You are the property of the Almighty God.
If you are God’s property then you have two choices: You can humble yourself now and be changed or you can stay stiff necked and let God humble you. I would recommend the first if at all possible.
I would encourage you to use the next 13 days to begin the humbling process. Search your heart, confess your sins, confess the sins of the church as a whole, confess the sins of your community. Make a list put it on paper. Beg God to change our hearts so that he can once again walk in our midst. Cause right now he’s saying: I can’t get next to you the way you are.
Let’s pray.
Oh Father, have mercy on us. Use the coming days to humble us before you. Have mercy oh God so that you can once again abide in our midst. Change our hearts oh God.
In Jesus name I ask these things. Amen.

Here the word of the Lord from the book of James chapter 4: "GOD IS OPPOSED TO THE PROUD, BUT GIVES GRACE TO THE HUMBLE." 7Submit therefore to God Resist the devil and he will flee from you.
8Draw near to God and He will draw near to you Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded. 9Be miserable and mourn and weep; let your laughter be turned into mourning and your joy to gloom. 10Humble yourselves in the presence of the Lord, and He will exalt you. ……Go in peace.