Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone (What to Eat While Fasting) — John Piper

I invite you to turn with me to the morning text in Matthew chapter 3, verse 16. Two weeks ago, we saw the Apostle Paul and the teachers in Antioch fasting together, and how the Holy Spirit said, set apart for me Saul and Barnabas to the work to which I'll call them, and the course of history was changed because they fasted and worshipped.

And God spoke. Last week, we saw Jesus speaking a word about fasting and saying, when the bridegroom, namely me, Jesus, is taken out of the way back to heaven, my disciples are going to fast. And today, we get to see Jesus fasting.

Jesus’ Baptism and Wilderness Temptation

Let's read it. Starting at 3 .16 of Matthew and then going to chapter 4, verse 4. After being baptized, Jesus went up immediately from the water, and behold, the heavens were opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and coming upon him.

And behold, a voice of the heavens saying, this is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. And after he had fasted 40 days and 40 nights, he then became hungry.

And the tempter came and said to him, if you're the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. And he answered and said to him, it is written, man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.

Let's pray before we move on. Lord, we believe and we are grateful that Jesus is right here, right now, by his Spirit, alive from the dead, speaking his own words to us through the Scriptures. We cherish that reality.

I pray, Holy Spirit, that you would press it home now, that you'd put your energy behind this Word and your miracle-working, life-giving, soul-rescuing, mind-protecting, guiding, maturing power behind this Word and leave it not merely in the power of my flesh, but grant that there would be an anointing upon this Word for your great and holy, life-changing, healing purposes.

Fasting teaches us, Father, what controls us, and I pray for a revelation this morning to our own consciences of what we're in bondage to, and I pray for liberty. You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.

May the truth set people free this morning, Father, in Jesus' name, amen. I have two hopes for this message. One is that we would all in this room know Jesus better in 20 minutes than we do now. Last week, I felt like I got to know Jesus better because I saw him answer a question, why don't you fast with your disciples?

I saw him answer that question in a way that would just knock you over if you would hear him say it. You can't fast while the bridegroom of Israel is here. The bridegroom, the husband of Israel has arrived.

That's God in the Old Testament. Emmanuel, God is with us. Now today, he wants to reveal himself to us in another way, a little differently than that. He wants us to know him today as a kind of new Joshua, a new Moses, entering a new wilderness, being tested in a new way, wrestling with the devil as the head and representative of the people of God, and getting victory so that he can take us out of the bondage of Egypt and into the promised land of salvation.

That's what he wants to reveal about himself this morning. That's my first desire for us. The second desire for us is I want us to know fasting better. I want us to understand why he fasted. I mean, this ought to just knock us off our block.

Here is Jesus. He is about to enter upon the most important ministry in the history of the world. If he fails, everything in the universe fails. If Jesus fails, no salvation because nobody can be crucified for my sins who can't beat the devil.

If he doesn't win in the wilderness, he won't win at the cross. I get no salvation. There's damnation everywhere and no salvation. This is an important moment and he begins it with fasting and that ought to just kind of stagger us because I face challenges and I'm not Jesus.

Fasting Before Spiritual Conflict

And if Jesus met the challenge of the devil with 40 days of fasting, what does it say about me? I mean, it ought to shock us. We ought to be asking ourselves right now, wow, could it be that there's a reason I struggle so much at work with boldness?

Could it be that there's a reason I get defeated by masturbation again and again and again and again and pornography and is there a reason for these things? I mean, is there an avenue of attack that I've totally neglected and Jesus didn't neglect and he won?

I mean, that's just a question we ought to be asking ourselves right now. Is his approach to ministry through 40 days of fasting to begin? And this morning, I don't know how many of you are on the discipleship reading plan, but I read this morning Acts 9 and Paul gets converted, he doesn't eat for three days.

His life is collapsing all around him. Everything he ever stood for is called into question by that experience on the Damascus road and he looks into the future and he says, I'm not going to eat. I don't know what to do.

I can't just eat. I got to have God. I got to know what's true. Ever come to a point like that in your life? I got to know what's true. Maybe God put you here this morning in this room because you're at a crossroads, a crisis in your life and you don't know whether Christianity is it or this relationship you're in is it.

It may be that he just wants to say to you, there's a way forward that's different from anything you've thought of that you might see this morning. So that's my second desire. Let's move into this text and see what we can find.

We were away as a staff for a few days this week. Actually it was kind of an individual study time and I was working on sermons and other things and we on Wednesday fasted like I've asked you to for breakfast and lunch and we prayed as a staff for an hour those times.

God met us and he wove together some texts as we just kind of out of our own devotional life were praying and sharing and there's a kind of a fabric of texts being woven together that is very significant in my life and I'll be sharing more of it with you and it bodes well for us as a church I believe.

These are pivotal days at Bethlehem. God is at work in a pivotal way with the master planning team and the new year and the fasting and visions of outreach that are fresh and when we were done praying I went back to my room and went like that because I knew I was behind with my annual report which was due on the 10th and I hadn't done it yet and so I spent a long time.

How would you write an annual report for 1994? Well I wrote it and I invite you to read it when they come out in a couple of weeks but here's the last paragraph. Finally thanks to you all for your prayer and your unfailing encouragements.

I am happy in this work because you have prayed. What a privilege to be here. What fresh breezes are blowing. My sails are up. The sky is clearing. The Lord is aboard and tells me there is good man fishing not far out to sea.

That's one of the things the Lord is saying. There is good man fishing not far out to sea. If we will as a church get our sails up. Spirits never stopped blowing. Spirits never stopped loving this church.

The spirits never stopped being powerful. We just need to get our sails up in the wind in a fresh way. God wants to do a deeper work among us. Charles Spurgeon, I'm reading Spurgeon every spare minute I get now because I got a lecture on Spurgeon here in two weeks at the pastor's conference and here's what he said.

A hundred years ago in London, his church, our seasons of fasting and prayer at the tabernacle have been high days indeed. Never has heaven's gate stood wider. Never have our hearts been nearer to the central glory.

In my heart when I read that, I said, yes, yes. I want us as a church to be nearer to the central glory so that it's like a fire. We just get in so close that we burn with the zeal that Jesus has for his own name and that he has for this perishing city.

And every one of us knows perishing people. Every one of us knows perishing people. And I want us to burn like Jesus burned for perishing people. Well, that's what the fast is all about, folks. That's why I'm calling you to fast on Wednesdays through this month.

And we've got a dream as a fast that's kind of in the simmering stages. And we're going to try to solidify it in the next two days about what we can do for the rest of the year. Not exactly the same as what we've been doing, but be praying that God lead us Monday and Tuesday as we're praying and planning for the rest of the year about how fasting might be in a way incorporated into our church life on through the year, that man fishing.

The Wilderness as a New Exodus

Have you ever been deep sea fishing? I love to deep sea fish with my dad. I grew up doing. You go out about 12 miles and it would be like shooting at a star if they didn't have these machines that can see fish.

It can see them with their little radio and they stop on top of them. It doesn't seem fair to the fish. But and then you drop your line, you catch them as you can. They move on till they see some more and they stop.

Jesus said to Peter, they're on the other side of the boat. Throw your net over here. He's got one of those machines and he just hovers over this city. He said right here, right here today over lunch.

Here they are. That's what it's about. Matthew 3, 16. Jesus comes up out of the water, having been baptized in identification with us sinners in our submission to the will of God and the righteousness of God.

It comes up out of the water and the Holy Spirit comes down like a dove comes down. That surprises because I mean, Jesus has got the Holy Spirit already. He is filled with the Holy Spirit. He was born conceived by the Holy Spirit.

John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb. So Jesus was too, I'm sure. So what's going on here? This is a special, powerful, extraordinary baptism and endowment or outpouring or filling or empowering of the Holy Spirit.

Why? For this extraordinary ministry he's entering into. So the Spirit comes down on him. And then to perhaps his utter dismay and our shock and encouragement, what's the first thing the Spirit does to him?

Verse 1 of chapter 4, then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. The first thing this dove, I mean, doves are gentle and innocent. Be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves.

What's the first thing he does? Pushes him into the lion's face, takes away his food for 40 days. Now, the reason I bank on this for a minute is because this week I know of four situations that are like that in this church, painful, difficult situations, physically, family kinds of situations.

And I just want you to feel in the pain, encouraged that when God said, this is my loved son who pleases me, just hear those two words now, I love him, I love him, I love him, I love him, and he pleases me.

Push him right out into the wilderness, into the face of Satan to be tempted and tested. Now, go out there and we'll see what is in your heart. I want you to know that that was not owing to the fact that he was displeasing to God, his father.

It wasn't owing to the fact that his father doesn't love him. And so, if you are in the flame or in the dryness and the face of this lion in the wilderness of your life and you are facing that kind of test today, do not jump to the conclusion, it's not because he loves me or it's...

Let me say that better. It is not because he doesn't love me. It is not because I don't please him in Christ as his child. There are higher and bigger purposes that are going on in my life with what I'm dealing with right now than the simple little demonic temptation that he's turned on me.

Okay? You got that? That's a little kind of parenthesis in this text that when the Holy Spirit, like a dove, came on him, it just didn't feel dove-like when he led him into that awful wilderness where there's no food and where there's just demons.

That didn't feel dove-like, but it was love. I love this son. He pleases me. Now, go, son. This is what we're going to do. This is the way we're going to live in this world. This is the way we're going to bring people out of Egypt into the promised land.

Going to go through the wilderness. And he triumphed by fasting. Forty days he fasted. He triumphed by fasting, and it ought to shake us, like I said earlier. Had he not succeeded in that test in the wilderness, then we would not be saved, and there would be no hope at all for us.

Oh, how much hung on his fasting. We owe, I owe my salvation to faith-filled fasting of the Son of God. Now, there's a fuller meaning here. That's kind of the first meaning that you see is that, oh, look, he fasted to get ready to meet the devil, and his fast was successful.

He met the devil with the Word of God, and he was triumphant, and he went on for three years, and he went to the cross successfully. He was never disobedient, therefore, he could bear my sins, and he rose from the dead triumphant over death, and we in him have hope.

Yes, that much we all see. That's the first thing that comes to mind. You know, there's something much, much bigger. Maybe not bigger. That wouldn't be the right way to say it. Deeper, different going on here.

Jesus as the New Joshua

And to see it, we need to look at the Old Testament place where he's quoting. Jesus is quoting the Old Testament when he addresses Satan here. So, I'm going to invite you, if you like to see things for yourself, to turn to Deuteronomy chapter 8.

That's the fifth book of the Bible in the Old Testament. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. The reason we're going to Deuteronomy is because amazingly, this is just amazing, Jesus three times says something back to Satan to escape temptation.

All three of those words come from Deuteronomy. The first one comes from Deuteronomy 8 .3. The second comes from Deuteronomy 6 .16. The third comes from Deuteronomy 6 .13. And when you see something like that, you say, wow, what's the deal here?

Why is Jesus drawing each of his swords from the scabbard of Deuteronomy? I mean, the Old Testament's a big book. There's a lot of words that he could use to fight the devil, a lot of great promises in the Psalms.

What is going on here that every time he responds to the devil, he takes it from chapter 6 or chapter 8 of Deuteronomy? There's very important reason for why he does that. Now, before we read those, let me read with you Matthew 4 .3 and 4.

The tempter came and said to him, if you are the son of God, command these stones to become bread. And Jesus answered and said to him, it is written, and then he quotes this text in Deuteronomy, man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.

Now, you watch as I read Deuteronomy 8, 2, and 3 for how many parallels you can see to this situation of Jesus. Starting at Deuteronomy 8 .2, Moses says to the people, you shall remember all the way in which the Lord your God has led you in the wilderness.

Just stop right there. The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. So, there's parallel number one. God led them in the wilderness. The Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness. Continuing, these 40 years, I think that's why Jesus fasted 40 days, as a kind of representative and head of a new Israel experiencing a new testing in a different wilderness for 40 days instead of 40 years.

Continuing, that he might humble you, testing you. Stop there. The word testing and tempting are the same in Greek. There aren't two different words, there's just one. So, when it says the Holy Spirit led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil, it's the same word as here, to be tested.

So, the people were in the wilderness being tested. Jesus went into the wilderness to be tested by God. Continuing, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep his commandments or not, and he humbled you, letting you be hungry.

Now, there's the reason he fasted. You see, the fast was not merely an arbitrarily chosen tactic of spiritual warfare. It was a self-conscious choice to identify with the people of God in the wilderness.

They were in the wilderness, they were led by God, they were tested through hunger. I will embrace that same testing and that same hunger upon myself as I pass through the same testing on the way to the promised land to show that I am a triumphant Joshua.

This is what's going on here. This is what we can learn about Jesus' self-understanding here. He self-consciously has been meditating all this time on these Old Testament texts, understanding who he is and trying to symbolically and with words show us what is in the offing here.

Namely, God is at this moment saying, I'm going to rescue my people out of the Egypt of sin. I'm going to bring them through the wilderness. To do that, I'm going to send a new Joshua in the world. Do you know that in Greek, Joshua and Jesus are the same word?

You know that? There aren't two words, one Joshua, one Jesus. When you read Acts 7 and you hear Stephen preach and he says, Joshua led them, the word is Jesus. It's exactly the same word that's always translated Jesus.

It kind of makes me wonder, why do English versions translate Jesus? Why don't they translate it Joshua? Well, probably just to be respectful. He is unique. He is unique. But know this, you shall call his name Joshua for he will save his people out of the Egyptian bondage of sin and lead them into the promised land.

You see, there didn't have to be a Moses and a Joshua because the only reason Moses didn't go into the promised land is because he blew it at the rock. Jesus never blew it, so he's all one. He can go all the way from Egypt into the promised land.

You don't need two, you just need one. And his name is Jesus, the one who gets them into the promised land. He's going to make it. So, what's going on here is God saying, I've got a deliverance in the offering here that is more spectacular than the deliverance I did back there in Exodus.

My deliverance has a new Joshua. This new Joshua is going to take on himself the suffering of the old people to form a new people. And he's going to be hungry for 40 days as part of that testing. And then he will pass, and he will defeat the devil, and he will die for sins, and he will rise from the dead, and he will open the doors of paradise, and you will in him enter into the land of milk and honey forever and ever and ever.

That's what's going on here. This is a glorious salvation that we're learning about and a great Savior who knows who he is and what he must do, and in love to you this morning, has embraced 40 days of pain before three years of pain.

Fasting Reveals What Controls the Heart

Now, there is something more, and I want you to see it as we draw to a close here that really, really surprised me. Before I point to it in the text, let me just stress something here about this testing idea.

It says in Deuteronomy 8, 3, that they were tested hungering. So, Jesus is being tested here. It's a test. Fasting is a test to see what controls you, what your bottom-line passions are. Let me read you a quote from Richard Foster in his chapter on fasting.

That's really powerful. More than any other discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us. This is a wonderful benefit to the true disciple who longs to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ.

We cover up what is inside of us with food and other things. Now, psychologically, that's spoken of a lot today with people who have a lot of pain in their lives, and we would say they medicate with food.

They numb out. They escape. They anesthetize the pain with food. It's a common paradigm for understanding why people eat wrong. You know what? All of us do that. Everybody, no exceptions. Everybody does that, which is why fasting uncovers all of us, our pain, our pride, our anger.

Let me read the rest of this. You'll hear how he says this. If pride controls us, he says, it will be revealed almost immediately. David said, I humbled my soul with fasting. Anger, bitterness, jealousy, strife, fear, if they are within us, they will surface during fasting.

At first, we will rationalize that our anger is due to our hunger, and then we know that we are angry because the spirit of anger is within us. We can rejoice in this knowledge because we know that healing is available through the power of Christ.

One of the reasons for fasting is attesting to know what's in us. What's in us? Because it will come out. It will come out. You'll see it, and you'll have to deal with it or quick smother it again. When mid-morning, you want food so bad or you anticipate eating at lunch, and suddenly you remember, oh, I can't have that pleasure this lunch.

What are you going to do with all the unhappiness inside? I'll tell you, the things I discover about my soul in extended fasting are so valuable for my warfare. What do you do with the dissatisfactions of relationships, of church, of your own soul, when you don't have supper to look forward to?

It's an awesome experience. You do that day after day for a few days. You will discover whether you can get resources from God to deal with life or whether you got to go back and medicate. Paul said, I will not be enslaved by anything.

I will not be enslaved by anything. Fasting reveals the measure of our slavery to food or television or whatever you choose to give up. We are to live by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.

Faith, Spiritual Warfare, and Victory Over Satan

Now, let me show you in closing something that I had not ever seen before as I studied this text. And if I had to do over again, I wouldn't entitle this text, this sermon, what I did because I saw a whole new angle on things that I didn't even know was here.

Up to this point, I've been stressing that fasting was chosen by Jesus as a means of preparing himself to deal with these satanic oppositions and temptations and that he fasted and he conquered. And then I added, no, the fasting is not just a means of preparation for testing.

It is a testing because when food is taken away, it starts to reveal who we are inside. That's what Deuteronomy 8 says, to know what is inside of you. So Jesus was already being tested. Those two approaches to fasting are not at odds with each other because when you are tested by fasting so that the true colors of your heart and all the passions beneath your comfort of being fed all the time emerge and you see yourself for who you really are, when you succeed in drawing on God to live on at that moment, you strike a blow to Satan that he cannot resist.

So those two things, the warfare dimension of fasting against Satan and the testing dimension itself are one because as you are tested and you yield to God and he sees that your heart is one of faith grasping and holding onto him and all your imperfections, then Satan looks at that and he gets mad and he cannot defeat.

This is the victory that overcomes the world, our faith. When Satan sees faith emerging out of fasting instead of murmuring, he's defeated in your life. But now here's the last thing that was new to me.

God’s Unexpected Provision in the Wilderness

To see it, I have to take you and show you the logic of Deuteronomy 8 .3. And if you're the kind of person, and there's a lot of them at Bethlehem that are this kind of person and I am one and like you to be one, likes to see the logic for yourself in the text and just not take my word for it, I want you to look at Deuteronomy 8 .3 one last time and watch something.

God fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know. Now stop there a minute. Notice, this is really remarkable. This kind of shook me up when I saw it. These people who were hungering in the wilderness, they don't keep on hungering.

They just hungered a little while and then they got manna. Jesus didn't get any manna or did he? Jesus didn't get any manna. So they got manna. And this manna, it says, you didn't know what this was and your fathers never knew what this was.

The point there is when God tests you and takes away from you your ordinary means of sustenance like bread, know this, he's got utterly, totally unheard of resources to meet your needs. That's the point of manna.

When he says, you did not know and your fathers did not know. What's the point of saying that? The point of saying it is when we face a problem in life, a marriage problem, a health problem, a church problem, a work problem, almost always we function in terms of what we know and what our fathers knew.

And if we don't know it and our fathers didn't know it, it doesn't exist. It's not there to solve our problems. I mean, how can you do anything with it when you don't know it and your fathers didn't know it?

Answer, God knows it. The whole point of living by faith and solving your problems by faith when they look like it's a dead end, there's nothing here, is to say, God's got manna. I don't even know what manna is.

Manna, what's that? But it can solve my hunger problem. It can sustain me. That's the point. Now, here, the next word is the key word, that. In order that, that's the key word. He gave you this utterly unexpected, come-out-of-nowhere, sustaining thing called manna.

In order that, he might make you understand something. What? That man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that comes out of the mouth of God. That's odd because manna is manna. It's not word.

He gave you manna to teach you to live by what comes out of his mouth. What do you make of that? He gave you manna. He gave you this utterly unheard of, utterly unexpected resource out of the sky, bread out of the sky, so that you'd learn not to live on bread, but on God.

That's what I think the meaning is. Now, to see the subtlety of Satan here, go back with me to Matthew. Satan is a better exegete of the Old Testament than almost anybody else. Satan knows how to read the Old Testament for almost all its worth.

Therefore, he doesn't come to people like you, who know your Bibles pretty well, and give you some stupid, off-the-wall interpretation to get you to be a heretic or to disobey. No way. He's smart. He is smart, and he knows how to read the Old Testament.

He's got the Son of God in front of him. Nobody knows the Old Testament better than Jesus. So, he's got to play cool here. He has to say something that's really got plausibility behind it. You know what he says, and this is what I've never seen before.

Satan comes to Jesus, and he says, you've been tested for 40 days, like the people back there in Deuteronomy, and you're hungry now. Well, you know what the text says. The text says that when they hungered, he gave them manna, supernatural bread.

And it was not sinful of God to do that. In fact, you were there, Son of God. You did it. You were the rock in the wilderness. You were the manna. You did it. Do it again. There's nothing wrong. You did it once.

Do it again. All the text says is, when you don't have natural bread, trust God for spiritual bread. So, do that. Just make it. Turn the stone to bread. Make it manna. That's good argument. That's good argument, folks.

That's powerful exegesis. That's so close. So close Satan comes to the real meaning of texts, and he misses by a mile. I mean, he misses by an inch, and then goes a mile, 10 million miles in the wrong direction.

Like one of those things that you shoot out into space, and you're trying to hit the planet, and it just almost catches the gravitational pull. It's gone. It's into space forever. You missed. 10 million tax dollars on the tours.

So Satan, he comes zinging in on Jesus here. And Jesus, Jesus watches this coming. He's never flustered, folks. If you've got Jesus inside, you can rest. You don't need to worry too much about Satan. Just bank on Jesus.

He sees this coming, and he says, kind of like, you're close. You're close. Yes, I was there. Yes, I made the manna. Yes, I could turn the stone to manna and eat it. Yes, they didn't hunger a long time.

They did get manna out of the sky. Yes, I could satisfy my hunger. But you're just missing the point of the text entirely. You've always been opposed to the point of this text. Your whole life is devoted against this text, namely, don't trust bread.

Trust God. That's it. That's it. Don't need bread. Need God. That was the point in the Old Testament. Because when it says, men shall not live by bread alone, but by everything that comes out of the mouth of God.

You know what comes out of the mouth of God? God. The self-revelation of God comes out of the mouth of God. When he spoke manna into existence, what they were to see and feed on is not merely manna. They missed the whole point if they just ate manna.

They were to see the love of God, and then say with the psalmist, the steadfast love of the Lord is better than manna, better than life, better than life. The point, Satan, and you missed the whole point, the point is not that I should love manna instead of bread, but I should love God instead of bread and manna.

That's the whole point, and you missed it because you hate God and you love miracles. Boy, this is, oh, this is important, folks. This is so important because Satan is real happy for us to work miracles.

Go ahead, do your miracle thing. He wouldn't care at all if we could work miracles and turn stone into bread if we loved the bread that we just made instead of God. So the whole point this morning, I'll leave you with this, is I welcome you into a fast, into a fast for more of God.

Fasting for More of God

Would you join me? Do you want more of God? I just felt the Spirit so powerfully in the last service as we closed. I just could see it on so many faces. Yes, yes to more of God. Yes to more of God and not bread and not manna, not the natural and not the supernatural unless the natural and the supernatural would get us God.

If God would give himself to me more through natural means, amen. If he'd give himself more to me through supernatural means, amen. But all we will have God or we play right into the hands of Satan who will only give us bread.

Everybody's living for bread. Some are living supernaturally for bread. Some are living naturally for bread but they're just living for bread and not God. Let's live for God. Let's want more of God. Let's fast for God and let's pray.

Oh Lord, some in this room need a first taste of God within through Jesus Christ by faith and I pray that you just draw them on in. You've been drawing them all morning. Draw them on into the kingdom.

Others of us here have known you for years and we've known you long enough to know that we love you and want you and want you and want you, more of you. So come feed our souls, I pray. Guard us from the evil one.

Show us what we're controlled by, conquer it and satisfy our hearts with Christ. In his name we pray, amen.