Wednesday's Word

"Then the disciples of John came to Him, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast often, but Your disciples do not fast?"
- Matthew 9:14 (NKJV)

A few months into Christ's public ministry, people began to pick up on something. There was something very different about Him and the way His disciples acted: They didn't seem to be rigorously preoccupied with the discipline of fasting. John the Baptist's disciples were especially aware of this, and they asked Jesus about it point-blank.

Instead of giving a quick answer, Jesus shared a parable with them:

"No one puts a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and the tear is made worse. Nor do they put new wine into old wineskins, or else the wineskins break, the wine is spilled, and the wineskins are ruined. But they put new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved." (Matthew 9:16-17 NKJV)

At first, this doesn't seem to answer anything. What does fasting have to do with patches and wineskins? But Jesus is illustrating an important contrast here. The Pharisees and John's disciples were wedded to a system of thought in which fasting was considered a badge of righteousness. Christ, however, revealed that true righteousness comes through a relationship with God through faith in Him, not fasting.

There's an old system competing with a new one. And just as a new patch can't work on an old cloth, and just as new wine can't be contained by an old wineskin, the new system that Jesus introduced wasn't compatible or containable by the old.

Fasting is still an important part of the believer's life (Matthew 9:15), but it isn't the end-all, be-all when it comes to being righteous. Only a relationship with God through Christ is that. Our righteousness is in knowing Him and not in what we do.

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We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
-Pierre Teilhard de Chardin