Should a Christian Fast in Secret or Tell Others?

Question 11117.

Fasting in secret is the standard Jesus sets for His disciples, and it is one of those instructions that sounds simple until you actually try to live it out among people who inevitably notice when you are not eating. Matthew 6:16-18 gives the clearest teaching on this question anywhere in Scripture, and it is worth working through carefully, because the temptation Jesus is addressing has not gone away just because our culture has changed since the first century.

I want to look at what Jesus actually says, why He says it, and how a modern believer can apply the principle of fasting in secret without pretending fasting can be hidden from every single person in your life, which it usually cannot be.

What Jesus Actually Says

Jesus sets His teaching on fasting directly against the practice of the hypocrites, who disfigure their faces so that their fasting may be seen by others. He is describing a specific first century practice of visibly performing distress, unwashed faces, dishevelled appearance, precisely so that onlookers would notice and be impressed by the fasting person’s apparent devotion. Jesus’ instruction runs the opposite direction entirely: when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. The whole point is to remove the audience, not to remove the fast.

This instruction sits alongside near-identical teaching on giving and prayer earlier in the same chapter, forming a consistent pattern across Matthew 6. In each case Jesus contrasts practising righteousness to be seen by others with practising it before an audience of one, your Father who sees in secret. Fasting in secret is not, therefore, an isolated rule about food. It is one instance of a wider principle about where a disciple’s spiritual practices are aimed, toward God’s approval or toward human observation.

Why Public Fasting Corrupts the Act

Jesus is not simply expressing a preference for modesty. He is identifying something that actually changes the nature of the act itself. When fasting is performed for an audience, it has already received its reward in full, Jesus says of the hypocrites, meaning the admiration and attention they sought is the only payment coming to them. There is no further reward from the Father, not because God is petty about sharing credit, but because the act was never actually directed toward Him in the first place. A fast undertaken to impress observers is, functionally, a performance for other people that happens to involve skipping meals, not an act of devotion toward God at all, regardless of how sincerely spiritual it might feel to the person doing it.

This is a sobering thought worth sitting with. The danger Jesus names is not limited to obvious hypocrites deliberately performing false piety. It can creep quietly into a genuinely sincere believer’s fasting, the moment satisfaction starts flowing, even slightly, from the thought that others have noticed the sacrifice being made, rather than from the actual seeking of God the fast was meant to express.

Does Fasting in Secret Mean No One Can Ever Know?

A practical question follows quickly: does fasting in secret mean nobody at all can ever know a person is fasting? Scripture itself does not support so rigid a reading. Nehemiah, Ezra, and the Old Testament prophets called entire communities to corporate, publicly known fasts, and Acts 13:2-3 records the church at Antioch fasting together as a congregation before commissioning Paul and Barnabas. Corporate fasting, by its very nature, cannot be hidden from the people participating in it, and Scripture nowhere condemns this practice.

What Jesus condemns specifically is the deliberate performance of visible distress designed to attract admiration for personal spiritual devotion, not the unavoidable fact that a spouse, close friend, or fellow church member might reasonably come to know that you are fasting through ordinary life together. A married person fasting for several days without their spouse noticing would require a level of secrecy that is neither realistic nor, I think, actually demanded by the text. What Jesus forbids is announcing the fast, dressing to display it, or fishing for recognition of it, not the incidental awareness that naturally arises from living in close relationship with other people.

Applying This in an Age of Social Media

This teaching has taken on fresh relevance in an age when it is entirely normal to broadcast daily life to an audience of hundreds or thousands online. Posting about a fast while it is happening, describing the spiritual insights being gained in real time to a watching audience, sits far closer to the hypocrites’ disfigured faces than to the private devotion Jesus commends, even if the language used sounds sincerely spiritual rather than obviously boastful. The medium has changed enormously since the first century. The underlying temptation, seeking human admiration for a discipline meant to be directed toward God alone, has not changed at all.

A useful test, worth applying honestly rather than defensively, is to ask why you want a particular person to know you are fasting. If the honest answer involves practical necessity, informing a spouse, requesting flexibility from an employer, coordinating a shared meal schedule, that falls outside what Jesus is addressing. If the honest answer involves wanting your devotion noticed and admired, that is precisely the temptation Matthew 6 warns against, however the disclosure is dressed up. I have written more on the practicalities of fasting itself in relation to what fasting actually is and whether fasting makes prayer more effective, both worth reading alongside this question.

The Reward Jesus Promises

It is worth noticing that Jesus does not say secret fasting goes unrewarded. He says the opposite: your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Fasting in secret is not a grim exercise in denying yourself any recognition whatsoever for its own sake. It is a redirection of where you look for that recognition, away from the fleeting approval of onlookers and toward the settled, certain approval of the Father who genuinely sees what is done in private and genuinely responds to it, even when no other human being ever finds out.

How the Early Church Understood This

The early church took fasting seriously as a private discipline while also practising it corporately at times, and the pattern that emerges from writings such as the Didache is instructive precisely because it shows believers observing regular fasts, often on set days each week, without the New Testament or the earliest post-apostolic writings ever suggesting these fasts should be publicly announced or displayed for admiration. The discipline itself was assumed and practised widely. What was consistently avoided, in keeping with Jesus’ own teaching, was turning the fast into a public performance intended to garner recognition or spiritual status among observers.

This historical pattern is worth remembering today, when the temptation runs not toward disfigured faces but toward a quieter, more socially acceptable version of the same problem, mentioning a fast a little too readily in conversation, or allowing others to infer spiritual seriousness from visible tiredness or irritability during a fast rather than genuinely keeping the matter between yourself and God. The specific form of the temptation has changed. Its substance, the desire for human recognition attaching itself to an act meant for God alone, has not.

It is also worth saying plainly that this discipline does not require inventing excuses or lying about what you are doing if someone directly and reasonably asks. Jesus’ teaching addresses the temptation to seek attention, not the obligation to deceive. A simple, honest, unremarkable answer, that you are not eating today, offered without elaboration or invitation for admiration, is entirely consistent with the spirit of Matthew 6. What Jesus rules out is dressing the fast up for effect, not answering a direct question truthfully when it is genuinely asked rather than fished for.

Fasting alongside prayer, rather than as a stand-alone discipline, is worth mentioning briefly here too. Scripture consistently pairs the two, and the secrecy Jesus commands for fasting fits naturally within a broader pattern of private, unshowy devotion that also characterises His teaching on prayer earlier in the same chapter, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, in Matthew 6:6. Both disciplines share the same underlying logic: genuine spiritual practice is aimed first and finally at God, and anything that shifts its primary aim toward human observation has already begun to lose what made it spiritual in the first place.

So, now what?

The next time you fast, resist the urge to mention it unless there is a genuine practical reason to do so, and be honest with yourself about which category any disclosure actually falls into. Wash your face, go about your ordinary business, and let the fast remain a private conversation between you and the Father who sees what is hidden. You will likely find that fasting undertaken this way, free from the pressure of an audience, becomes far more genuinely about seeking God than performing for anyone watching.

But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Matthew 6:17-18, ESV