Words of Jesus Podcast - Think Red Ink

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

CHAPTER 14:  JESUS EXPLAINS HIS ATTITUDE ON FASTING (PART 3)THE DISCIPLES of John the Baptist and of the Pharisees came to Jesus, troubled in theirhearts, asking:            “Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but thy disciples fast not?”            “Jesus replied:            “Can ye make the children of the bridechamber fast, while the bridegroom is with them?  But the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days.            “No man putteth a piece of a new garment upon an old; if otherwise, then both the new maketh a rent, and the piece that was taken out of the new agreeth not with the old.  And no man putteth new wine into old bottles [skins]; else the new wine will burst the bottles [skins], and be spilled, and the bottles [skins] shall perish.  But new wine must be put into new bottles [skins]; and both are preserved.  No man also having drunk old wine straightway desireth new; for he saith, ‘The old is better’.” ***Scriptures are written; Word of God is Jesus; - Who told you that?; verbal instructions from God (Jews added fences/laws); my hour is not yet come (not this, not right now); "where I go…" Jesus had confidence in the Father; LAST GREAT DAY; - water moving by bucket; Jesus says, "I'm over here...I have the water..."; Jesus spoke of the Spirit; "what we know..." is not always correct!; from Bethlehem (arguing a mute point) Galillee?; - "caught in the act" Moses says... - "What sayeth thou?"; JESUS ALWAYS OBEYED HIS FATHER - IN THE SPIRIT - NOT UNDER THE LAW; expected a conflict w/Moses - Jesus said, "I agree... He without sin - come on..."

Think Red Ink Ministries presents The Words of Jesus Series with Don C. Harris Hello my friends and welcome once again to the Words of Jesus series. I'm your host Don Harris and I'm doing what I love to do, which is to introduce to you the red ink. I know, we should be a lot more aware of the red ink than we are and it shouldn't be such a novelty but it is a novelty because it seems that people are really interested in preaching their ideas and not necessarily interested in repeating what jesus said you know jesus gave us a lot of good advice and i think that we ought to take it. And most of all, I think we should think red ink. We've been working from this little book called The Words of Jesus,

and we're in chapter 14 now. And in this chapter, we're talking about, he's talking about fasting and his attitude toward it. The attitude toward fasting is something that probably ought to be examined among ourselves and our families and our churches and our society in general. And unfortunately fasting has been thrown into the same box as meditation has and that is that other religions

do this. Pagan religions do this, pagan religions do this, so we don't want anything to do with it. You know, they fast and they do these transcendental meditations and such. Nobody's telling you to do a transcendental meditation. Nobody's telling you to do that. And when it comes to fasting, we're not trying to fast ourselves into hallucinations or any of the rest of this kind of thing just because

the world and and i should say the religious world use these particular tools does not mean that they're not supposed to be in the christian toolbox. You know, a great example of this is, you know, why do you pray? Pagan denominations pray. They pray to idols, but they pray. Maybe you shouldn't do that. You know, the strange Middle Eastern faith that we're all worried about and scared of and don't want anything to do with, they all pray. Maybe we shouldn't pray. Well, you know, to talk like that, you'd think I was nuts, and probably

I would be. But for some reason, meditation, because it's practiced by other religions, we don't want anything to do with that. Why is that? Fasting is used by other religious, it's practiced by other religions, religions that are not like ours, religions that are inherently Christian, therefore we don't want anything to do with that. And I'm thinking, why did you never attach that idea to prayer? You know what? We just need to face facts. We do whatever we want to do for our own reasons. And if we don't have a reason, we just make up a reason. But the fact

is, is that our Lord Jesus gives us a commandment to fast. Did you know that? I don't know if you ever put it together, but in the very thing that we're going to read today, you will hear Him say that that's what we need to do. Well, if we're going to do this, we probably ought to look into it and see what it's all about. And in later programs, we're going to be talking about the idea of fasting, if you're not careful you will find yourself doing how Jesus described as putting new wine into old bottles. We don't want to do that. What we want to do is we want to do the right thing

for the right reason. And fasting is or at least should be a part of every Christian's life. I'll explain what I mean. There is a problem with many of us who call ourselves Christian, and that is that we don't live in a pure conscience toward God. As a matter of fact, the Bible teaches that the mikvah or what Christians refer to

as the baptismal the ordination of baptism unfortunately in the Christian world it's turned into something that is done one time and that was not true in the Jewish understanding of the mikvah. It's something that is done from time to time. As a person, as our New Testament scriptures teach, answer a good conscience toward God.

And I'm afraid that a lot of Christians don't live in this good conscience toward God. We hear the commandment, we hear Jesus tell us to keep the commandments. If you keep the commandments, then I'll come into you, I'll lead you and guide you. But we go to our pastors with this, we go to our preachers with this, our New Testament counselors with this, and they tell us, well, nobody can keep the commandments. And so therefore, we find our reason not to believe,

we find our reason to continue like we've always done, and that's exactly what we do. We continue like we've always done, and we continue not to believe and not to practice anything, or even try to practice something like keeping the commandments. Well first of all let me say that there is no commandment you cannot keep. You can keep all ten commandments without a problem. If you do so you're obeying your Lord Jesus Christ. You're not obeying Moses. You're not obeying a rock out in the wilderness that

had these commandments inscribed on it. You're obeying your Lord God Jehovah and you are obeying his son Jesus Christ when he tells us to keep his commandments. If you keep my commandments then I'll come into you I will lead and guide you into all truth. You'll be my, the Lord Jehovah says that we'll be his son. He'll be our father. We're going to be his people. That's the way it's done. That's the way it's done.

We do what he wants us to do for his reasons. Well as we do that, the reason that we do that is because we're looking for the most important ingredient in any Christian's life. Yours, mine, everybody's life. And that's guidance. Now the church is essentially taking over guidance. You don't have to fast to go to church. You don't even have to quit sinning to go to church. You can just go there and he'll tell you what to do.

And this is the right thing to do and this is why. And if he convinces you intellectually, then it becomes a part of your life. Otherwise, it goes begging. It gets set aside. And that is hugely unfortunate because Jesus' promise to us was not that if you'll accept me as your Lord and Savior that I will give you a book and that book will lead you and guide you into all truth and anything you don't understand you need to find yourself a pastor

and have him explain it to you. I'm sorry but you won't find that idea, that concept, or those words in the scriptures. What you will find is if you keep my commandments then me and my Father will take up our abode in you. We'll manifest ourselves to you. And that's where the guidance comes from. So why don't people do that? Well, like I say, first of all, they have trouble when they decide to keep the commandments. They may find it difficult for one reason or another, usually

because of their own selfishness. And then they are counseled, well you can't keep the commandments anyway, so they give up. And so they just give in. Well, you know, I can't keep the commandments, but Jesus is going to save me anyway. Well, I don't know where you're, how you're basing that upon what you are basing that, but it's not a scriptural concept at all. Jesus expects us to do certain things, and we will be judged for what we do and have done in the flesh. You'll never be judged for what you believe. You'll never be asked what you believe. What you believe will never be a part of your

judgment. It will only be a part of your judgment insofar as it is determined what you believe by what you have done. And that is, he'll never ask. He's going to ask what you've done. Then he'll know what you believed. This gets to be very, very ask he's going to ask what you've done then he'll know what you believed this is this is this gets to be very very serious and sometimes i'm afraid it can just get a little bit discouraging but the idea is to do the right thing well how do we know what the right thing to do is well you want to take my advice my advice is that you keep the commandments, which you can do. You can not offend your conscience, which is a little more difficult.

And then you can take time every day to hear the voice of God. And when you do that, you're going to find that sometimes things just don't happen the way you want them to. I get the emails from people. I get mail. I hear phone calls. I hear people say, okay, I started meditation, but I didn't hear nothing. And I'm sorry about that. I know you were expecting to hear something in your ears because I do have a tendency to talk about hearing the voice of the Lord.

Truth is, as our Lord Jesus says, no man's ever heard his voice. No man's ever seen his face. So what are you telling us to do, Don? You're telling us to listen for his voice? Yes, I am. And it's only because I don't have the vocabulary. I don't have the words to describe what, well, the Lord Jesus himself didn't have the words to describe. Have you ever seen anybody outside of perhaps a birth defect or perhaps some horrible accident or something? Have you ever seen a person with no ears? No, you probably haven't. Well, why would Jesus ask something as silly?

Why would he make a statement as silly as you have ears to hear, let Him hear? The key is ears to hear. And when we spend time before the Lord and He speaks to us, chances are you're not going to hear His voice in your ears. As a matter of fact I've had people try to give me their testimonies about, you know, hearing the voice of God. And I said, oh, that's a shame. I hate to hear that. That's a shame. Well, what do you mean? I said, so that you don't have a relationship with God that he can speak from the inside.

You don't have a relationship with God that He could actually put message and put understanding and knowledge into your spirit. He has to speak it through the air and vibrate your eardrums and suffer the narrowness of language and vocabulary and then have to deal with the narrowness of your mind. And He's trying to take a concept that fills the entire universe and channel it through a little tiny ear hole in the side of your head that's pretty pitiful. That's pitiful.

Look, you've seen gold letters in the sky? Has God spoken to you because he wrote it in the sky? That is a failure on your part. That is a failure that he cannot speak to you unless it's some miraculous thing. We talked about it earlier in the series where the fellow says, you know, I want you to heal my son. He says, you won't believe in me

unless you see signs and wonders. Well, that's us. That's us. We want signs and wonders. We don't want guidance. We just want to tell people we got guidance. These kind of things are really, really pitiful. But sometimes these ideas come out of well-intentioned people who just want to be guided of the Lord. They go to the Lord, they spend time before

the Lord, and they say, I didn't hear nothing. Well it's probably not because you don't have pieces of cartilage on the side of your head, but because you don't have ears to hear. Now many things can cause this. Many things can bring about this kind of deafness. I don't know that I want to talk about it right now, but there is such a thing as a spiritually heavenly father-induced deafness.

There is such a thing as that, where he closes their ears, where he fixes it so they can't hear, and we'll talk about it later, but it's so in depth to discuss those kinds of things that we don't want to necessarily take time today to do this. What we want to do is hopefully open these lines of communication. I closed last session with the story of David how David had found himself in sin and he was living in this state of poor conscious conscience between he and the Lord and

he got to the point where he could not hear the voice of God. Well how do you know that Don? Because Nathan the prophet was sent to him to speak to him about the clog in the pipe so to speak. He was saying this is the problem and this is where we need, this is how it needs to be fixed. David heard the story that Nathan told him about the man who lost his

little ewe lamb that he loved like a daughter but this fellow wanted to eat it. And David says, well that man needs to be killed. And Nathan says, David, here's the problem, buddy. You are that man. You are the man that is in this story. And he explains to him that what he had done to Uriah the Hittite in taking his wife and having Uriah murdered was a horrible and heinous sin

that will cost David and the children of Israel for a long, long time. And so why couldn't David have heard this for himself? Because his flesh overcame his, well, his good sins. It overcame his desire to be righteous before the Lord. And how does the flesh get to this point? Look, let's just face facts. Our flesh

dictates to our bodies, I'm sorry, our bodies, our flesh, dictate to our minds how this day is going to go and when things are going to happen and when's lunch. And it is really not the way that we need to live. As a matter of fact the Bible teaches that we are to live by the Spirit of God. Now I know that if our bodies are demanding or asking for food that

it's likely because we need food. And to ignore that for any length of time can cause all kinds of particular medical situations, physical situations that are not good. And I'm certainly not advocating that. But I guess what I'm saying is that if our mental faculties are affected so much by our flesh, we would probably do ourselves well to learn to control the flesh so that it doesn't

control our minds, which in turn affect our spirit. This is a serious problem among Christians. We have strictly forbidden alcohol, but the idea of overeating has never really gotten on the table yet. Overeating is probably okay, and drinking is not. Well, you'll find that Jesus as I say, harnessed those two horses

in the same yoke. And those two are right side by side and they are very dangerous to deal with whether it be overeating or drunkenness. And why is that? Because they affect so highly the flesh, which affects so highly the mental state of a person, you cannot think clearly if your belly's full of food or your belly's full of wine. It doesn't really matter. It may affect us

differently and perhaps more strongly and perhaps more dangerously in some cases, but it does affect us. One of the things about fasting is that it puts that body at bay, at least. Now some people wonder, how long does it take to do that? Well, sometimes you can fast a meal. Sometimes you can fast a meal. Sometimes you can fast a day. Sometimes you can fast three days or a week or 10 days or 40. Don't get all excited about the letter 40 or the number 40. Don't get all excited about, you know, 40 days and get worried about starving to death.

As a matter of fact, there's a great book that I would love for everyone who is interested in fasting to read. It's by the author Sheldon. I don't remember his first name right away. But this particular book is about fasting and health, and there's a lot of good information in it. And if I'm not mistaken, it was written in the late 50s when most of Americans were all, they looked like vertical people instead of a rack of pool balls. And even in those days when we didn't have gobs of useless fat hanging on our bodies and we weren't, of course we didn't have the nutritional concerns that we do today. And I mean concerns in that nutrition

hardly exists in our grocery stores. But he said that even in that day he said that the average American ought to be able to go 100 days without food. I'm not a doctor. I can't say that. I don't know. But I'm just saying that the idea of 40 days, it may seem like a really long time, but perhaps it's not. Perhaps we need to be a little better trained in this area of fasting where that's not just such a shock to us to even think that way. Many times you'll find that a prayer, a concern or something that's brought before the Lord

can be answered in a day. And the fast of a day brings about what you need to answer that situation. And again, you know, you find people who are interested in meditation. They're interested in hearing the voice of the Lord. And because they don't receive these results instantaneously they say, well it doesn't work. But the fact is that much of the time we spend before the Lord in consideration of these things, He's pouring into our spirit His

knowledge and His wisdom that may not come out today. It may be a week from now that you'll find yourself in a situation where someone's speaking to you and it's a very inflammatory tone. You know fully well that if you say what's on your mind you're going to make it worse. And it's usually been your habit to do so. But you don't know how to deal with those kind of things. And sometimes

a person who involves themselves in meditation and taking time before the Lord, they will find themselves having gone in, into, in the middle of, out the other side of those situations, having made them better. I said the right thing. I did the right thing. I totally diffused that whole situation. How did that happen? Well, you know what you're doing is, you're speaking the word of God out from you. And, you know, this is what the Bible means when it says

that we are to speak as the oracles of God. Well if you're not hearing the oracles of God, how are you going to speak them? This has to be a part of our life. And if you do take time to hear the voice of the Lord and you're keeping His commandments, you're not disobeying His conscience, disobeying your conscience, you're going to hear his voice. No, perhaps not through the little pieces of cartilage on the side of your head. I hope not. But your spirit is going to very well

accept and soak up and hear the words of God. Well, there may come a time in your life when that's just not so easy to do. When your flesh is telling you what to do all the time. It's running your entire life. There's a book by C.S. Lewis where he talks about how he stopped a man from thinking in ways that he wasn't too tickled about him thinking, which was in the ways of righteousness and making things right with God

and becoming at peace with God, just by reminding him that it was time for lunch. Look, how many times have we been interrupted in our train of thought about very, very weighty and powerful things in our life, very important things, spiritual things, by the fact that it's lunchtime. Well, who says it's lunchtime? Well, my belly's growling, my body is rebelling,

and I have to eat, I've got to eat. Look, I understand being hungry, I get that. But I think that hunger itself, the satisfaction of hunger, the daily habit or necessity of eating, I think that it's a perfect example to us about just how intrusive this thing called our body is. How intrusive this thing called our body is. How intrusive this thing called the flesh is. And if, you know, let's

be honest. It's not just hunger that occupies our thinking. Sometimes we think about things that we really ought not think about. Well where does that come from? Well it comes from within our flesh. I know you'd like to blame the devil for it and say the devil put this thought in my mind and the devil did this and the devil did that. But again, from C.S. Lewis' screw tape letters, I think it's just a huge bit of wisdom that we understand that much of the

greatest work the devil ever does is not putting thoughts into somebody's mind, but just keeping them out. All he's got to do is keep you away from the voice of the Lord within your own self. He can't clog the pipe. He can't overpower the Lord. He can't put his hand over his mouth, but he can put his hands over your ears. And his main tool to do so is not a bunch of imps. It's not a bunch of demons flying around. It's not

wicked people that are possessed of the devil. You know what his greatest tool is? The greatest tool in your toolbox is this time of meditation where you spend with the Lord. The greatest tool in His toolbox is your flesh. Buddy, He just seems to know how to make that thing work. And I think that we need control over it. And I think if you're honest, you know we need

control over this too. And I think if you're honest, you know we need control over this too. And I ask, how are you going to do this? How are you going to get this kind of control? Well, Jesus is saying in here the disciples of John the Baptist and of the Pharisees came and said, you know, our leader, John the Baptist, and our leaders, the Pharisees, teach us to fast. But your disciples aren't fasting. Why aren't they fasting? Jesus replied, can you make the children of the bride chamber fast while the bridegroom is with them?

But the days will come when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then shall they fast in those days. Friend, there's your commandment right there. Is the Lord here on the earth? Is he physically manifesting himself here? Of course not. Is the bridegroom taken away from the bride chamber? Yes, absolutely. These are the days that we're supposed to fast. Why?

Because we need that communication. We have to have it. And if your flesh is giving you trouble, you can pray about this all you want. And you will never get control of it. You have to deal with that physical need, that physical desire. You have to deal with that physical need, that physical desire. You have to deal with that in a physical way. And you have to make up your mind that your body is not going to control you. So what tool are you going to use? It's going to be fasting. It's going to be fasting. Why don't you write to me? Why don't you sit down and write me an email and let me know that you listen to the show?

I'd love to hear from you. Let us know you're listening. Where are you listening? What time are you listening? I need to know all these kind of things. Send an email to Don at thinkready.com. Don at thinkready.com. Or you can just simply write to Think Ready Ministries,

PO Box 718, Pytown, New Mexico, 87827. All right, we'll see you next time. Bye-bye. you've been listening to don c harris of think red ink ministries ThinkRedInc.com. That's ThinkRedInc.com. Join us again for the next episode in the Words of Jesus series. you