Isaiah 58
Our lives today seem to be built around the illusion that we can do all things and be all things. Every device is ready to be our servant. The choice is ours. We are like gods who have access to all the information that we need. We can get everything we want and we can do anything we imagine. Of course, we can only surf over the façade of our dreams. For people who are so very much in charge, we actually feel trapped in pathways from which the exit is not at all clear. Is there some good way of life that would deliver to us the true freedom of heart and mind that we pretend to have already? Is there some way out of the dark pit?
The Lord is powerful to save. His arm is not too short to grant us purpose and meaning. He can hear and He can save. The essence of what we need is the removal of the existing separation between us and our God. That separation comes from our sin. Because of our walking away from His Word, it seems to us that the Lord that we once knew is distant. This feeling comes not from any inability on God’s part to help us. It is the consequence of our unwillingness to take a hard look at the history of our sin and to honestly repent.
Oddly enough, we can be very far away from God, and yet still consider ourselves as somehow on His side. We may maintain a form of godliness, but we are far away from the kind of power that we need to break away from the prison of laziness, self-centeredness, and addiction. We still address God with words of almost mock confusion. “I have served you with fasting. I have asked you for help. Where are you? Why are you not helping me? This couldn’t be anything that I have done wrong, could it be? Why are you not helping me?” Yet in the day of our fasting we still treat other people like objects.
God cares about how we deal with those who are created in His image. God cares about His church that He is building and our understanding of what it really means to seek first His kingdom. True humility before God needs to be something more than tears and sadness over the misery of our lives and our disappointment in what seem to be unanswered prayers. True humility sees the beauty of God’s perfect law, adoring the Christ who kept that Law, and abhorring our own sin.
It will not be enough to look and feel spiritual, if we still live our lives entirely for ourselves. It will not be enough to have words of humility before God if we abuse the people around us with impatience and even violence. Fasting like that only confirms our devotion to hypocrisy. It does nothing good for us. A life like that is the trap that we live in which weighs us down, not the answer for us that would bring us real freedom. We have all the options we could ever dream of, yet we are stuck in a mess and don’t seem to know how to get out of our own false efforts to display humility before God.
We need to remember what we have done in walking away from Him and repent of this. There is no other way to health and true freedom and life. Our great aid in true repentance is the solid gospel recognition that in every particular where we have so often failed, the Lord Jesus Christ has succeeded, and He has done this for us.
God wants us to dedicate our lives to justice for the oppressed. He wants us to open up our family tables to those who are alone. He wants us to care about the members of our own household who are in need. What about this is too hard to understand? Why don’t we just commit ourselves now to that kind of generous life as those who know that we have received amazing generosity from Him?
If we will do this, He promises benefits that are shockingly wonderful. We will have light, and not just a little, but a light that breaks forth like the dawn. I am able to seen the sun rise most mornings. It scatters darkness with a bountiful overflow of joyous brilliance that refuses to be contained. We will be healed, and not through the gradual knitting together of old wounds into scarred skin and bones, but with a new force of strength that springs up from death. We will have the righteousness of Christ before us as our recommendation wherever we go, and the heavenly glory of the Lord as our protection from any foe. We will speak to God, and He will not only hear, He will say, “Here I am.” All our holiest desires will be satisfied, and a new day will come for the next generation.
This is what the Lord has for the one who will truly rest in our Sabbath, the Lord Jesus. We will call Him our delight who has worked for us the work that God requires. And we will be caught up in the Sabbath train of the Prince of our Salvation in whom we trust. He will be our delight, and we will feed on the food of heaven according to the command of heaven’s God.
There is a way out of our madness. His name is wisdom. There is a way out of darkness. His name is light. There is an answer for those in the pit of despair. His name is hope, and He is to be followed.
posted by Pastor Magee @ 7:00 AM
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