I’ve always struggled to be convinced of the spiritual benefits of fasting but John Piper’s meditation on the gifts of the Magi is helpful:
‘The gifts are intensifiers of desire for Christ himself in much the same way that fasting is. When you give a gift to Christ like this, it’s a way of saying something like this:
The joy that I pursue is not the hope of getting rich with things from you. I have not come to you for your things but for yourself. And this desire I now intensify and demonstrate by giving up things in the hope of enjoying you more, not the things.
By giving to you what you do not need and what I might enjoy, I am saying more earnestly and more authentically, “You are my treasure, not these things.”
I think that’s what it means to worship God with gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh.’
