Isaiah 58:6-12

⁶ “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:

to loose the chains of injustice

and untie the cords of the yoke,

to set the oppressed free

and break every yoke?

⁷ Is it not to share your food with the hungry

and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—

when you see the naked, to clothe him,

and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

⁸ Then your light will break forth like the dawn,

and your healing will quickly appear;

then your righteousness will go

before you,

and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard.

⁹ Then you will call, and the LORD will answer;

you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I. 

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,

with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.

¹¹ The LORD will guide you always;

he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land

and will strengthen your frame.

You will be like a well-watered garden,

like a spring whose waters never fail.

¹² Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins

and will raise up the age-old foundations;

you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,

Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.

Two men were talking. One of the men said, “When it comes right down to it, we are all basically selfish. We take care of Number One and the heck with everyone else.”

The other man responded, “I don’t agree with you, and I’ll tell you why. I stopped recently to get my paper at a café as I do every day. I’ve known the man who sold me that paper for years, but one day he had tears in his eyes and I asked him why. He said, “Do you see that bus stop over there? There’s a woman who comes every day around this time. She sits there for about an hour knitting and waiting. Buses come and go, but she never gets on and no one ever gets off for her to meet. The other day I took her a cup of coffee and sat with her for awhile. Her only son lives a long way away. She last saw him about two years ago when he boarded one of the buses right there. He is married now and she has never met her daughter-in-law or seen their new child. She told me, ‘It helps to come here and wait. I pray for them as I knit little things for the baby, and I imagine them in their little tiny apartment, saving money to come home. I can’t wait to see them.”
Then the man said, “The café owner took a deep breath and told me that he had just looked out the window and there were the woman’s son and his family getting off the bus. When they fell into her arms, the look on her face was the nearest thing to pure joy he had ever seen. ‘I’ll never forget the look on her face as long as I live,’ he said.

The next day when I returned to the café my friend was behind the counter and before he could say anything, I asked him, ‘You sent her son the money for the bus ticket, didn’t you?’ The store owner looked back at me with eyes full of love and a smile and replied, ‘Yes, I sent him the money.’

In that story, who are you? Which one represents your life? Are you like the man who categorized people as largely selfish, and included himself in that description–people who simply live for the day and try to take care of their own business. That kind of person has no color. It’s like a picture in black and white. The basics are there, but there’s not a whole lot of life in the person.
Or are you the man in the story who has experienced the joy of the café owner who was moved and touched by a very heartwarming story, but notice that the story is not his own. He is simply passing on a story that he has heard. He is not the person in the story itself. That’s like an oil painting. It has color and has life and passion in it, but it’s not real. That kind of person is alive but has made no difference to anyone’s life.

Or are you the café owner. Do you see the difference in the experience of life. The man telling the story was warmed by it, but the man who made a difference in this woman’s life and joy he experienced is like life at its best. It’s real! Those people make a difference in this world.

Who do you want to be? Do you want to live and experience life as more than a two-dimensional character on a page without color? Do you want to experience the life and vitality of God? Do you want to be a beautiful oil painting, warm and glowing but stuck to the canvas? Or do you want to be like the man who experienced the joy and color of God in his life and who then brought it into other people’s lives and made a difference.

Do you want to experience hope, meaning and purpose in your life–the purpose that comes from touching other people’s lives? Then stop watching life pass you like you see it on TV. Involve yourself in the lives of others and make a difference.

One of the great tragedies of today is the way in which we have become isolated from people. It has also meant that we have become isolated from discovering and experiencing meaning and significance in our lives. Many people cannot say what difference they have made in another person’s life.

Whenever the elections come around, the parties, usually the ones in second place, tell us that we must make our vote count. But I hope this morning that you might say to yourself by the time this is over, “I want my life to count.”

Your life is more than a vote. You need to make your life count. I hope that you will catch God’s vision expressed to us in Isaiah 58. This has always been a significant text for me of God’s intention and desire for us.

If you read the first 39 chapters of Isaiah, God is basically communicating a word of judgment because Israel had lost their passion for God. As a result, they made no difference in the lives of those who surrounded them. They had lost the saltiness in their lives, and God confronts them with the challenge of Chapter 58.

“If you do away with the yoke of oppression,

with the pointing finger and malicious talk,

¹⁰ and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry

and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,

then your light will rise in the darkness,

and your night will become like the noonday.”

In the last 27 chapters, 40-66, God then offers a message of hope to them: “Here’s what I am going to accomplish through the Messiah.”

God’s hope and desire for us, God’s vision for his people, has always been that we serve a broken world. In the passage, God expresses two things that are needed in order to serve a broken world.

The first is a deep spiritual root. At first impression it seems that God is ridiculing fasting but this is not so.
The problem was that the Jewish people lost the heart and soul and depth and meaning for fasting. It became only ritual and going through the motions. That’s why in this passage God almost mocks them by asking, “Is this the kind of fast I’ve chosen, one day to humble yourself, one day to bow your head, to lie in sackcloth?” Is it just the activity, just the function, just the ritual, just the ceremony? Then you’ve forgotten what it’s all about.
They had reduced a real spiritual activity which could bring the power of God into their lives to simply an act. They lost the heart and purpose of fasting.

Fasting is a practical thing. It frees us up by not preparing food so that we can take that time and spend it with God. As the Jewish people spent time with God, they developed a closer relationship and a closer walk. God’s fire and spirit and presence and word would then speak to their hearts and minds and touch their lives and empower them for greater obedience. In this way their lives could be conformed into the image of his son.

Fasting is a symbolic act. Why did God choose food? Because it is a symbolic way of saying that there are more important things than the tangible, than our possessions, than food, than this here-and-now life that we experience. There is one thing more important, and that’s God. We need God more than the physical things we tend to focus on. In Matthew 4:4, Satan told Jesus to turn the rock into bread to satisfy his hunger. However, Jesus clearly communicated the priority in his life: “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God.” Israel forgot that, and they put bread above God. They reduced fasting, which could have put them in touch with the living God, to ritual and ceremony, only going through the motions.

Does this describe our devotion? Does this describe why we attend church? Does this describe how we worship? Are we simply here just for the bowing, just for the humbling, just to look as if we are faithful and religious and we are Christian people? Is it just to go through the ceremony? Then we are no different than that black-and-white cartoon, living a very sterile existence, living simply in the area of body and soul. We lack spirit, we lack passion, and we lack heart. We are simply surviving like Israel.

If this is you, I encourage you to come out of the gray and into the colors of God. One of the features of the Walk to Emmaus is the way in which faith is presented like the colors of the rainbow. When God comes into a person’s life and empowers their heart and soul, mind and spirit, it enlivens and animates them. It brings God’s colors into their life. Are you experiencing the full color of God? It is interesting that God is described as light. As we know, the full spectrum of light has every color that exists, coming together. God desires to bring that color and life into us. Are we plugged in, or are we simply going through the ritual, going through the emotions?

Does this describe your life? Have you made a heartfelt commitment to God? The church and the religious life is not simply order and polity, but it begins with a passionate commitment to God. Too often churches have left this passion out and all that’s left was the cold, black embers of religion, ritual and social activity. As a result, some churches are no different from any other social agency.

Is the spirit of God in your life? Do you have passion? In order to serve a broken world, it begins there but it doesn’t end there.

Once we have this vertical relationship with God, once we have God’s world animating our lives, it then spills out in the horizontal dimensions of our lives and this is the second feature of Isaiah’s text. It is interesting that the first four of the Ten Commandments all deal with loving God and having a passionate devotion to him. The last six commandments deal with our relationships with each other. They deal with loving people.

What does God want us to do? If we take this passion and relationship with God into real life, he says that fasting should motivate us and empower us to loose the chains of injustice, to set the oppressed free, to share our food with the hungry, to provide the poor wanderer with shelter, to clothe the naked, to not turn away from your own flesh and blood, to do away with the yoke of oppression and the pointing finger and malicious talk.

It is interesting that in the midst of this great social context, God mentions, “As you feed the poor, also do away with the pointing finger and malicious talk.” What does that refer to? In general, it’s character assassination, but it is in the context of the poor. It means to also do away with the attitude that as we give and minister to those who are broken, we don’t judge them by saying “They really should get a job” or “The reason they’re having these problems is that they have to quit making babies.” We need to turn away from all those malicious things we say and the conclusions about people’s lives whom we don’t know.

What are you doing in your life to accomplish God’s purpose? How are you making a difference? It is very clear when you read Matthew 26: 34-36. “Then the king will say to those on his right ‘Come, you are blessed of my father. Take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world for I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you visited me.” What are we doing to touch people’s lives?

God is telling us to find a need in someone’s life and meet it. Sometimes it’s easier to put things in simple language, and I’ll put this in very simple, child-like language:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty
Dumpty together again.

That’s the world. Genesis 3 is about the fact that we have all fallen off the wall. We all have a brokenness in our lives. People cannot bring the healing that only God can bring. If God has put your life back together, he then charges you to go out and find people who have fallen off the wall and to help put their lives back together again. Are you doing that?

Someone once said that if enough people got involved, we literally could solve all our social problems. It is not magic, it simply means getting involved. We need to say, “we are not just about ourselves. We are about making a difference.” Faith makes no difference unless it comes into the world in which we live. Unless it does, it is like a movie on a TV screen. It’s great to watch and I laugh sometimes, but it makes no difference in my life. It has solved none of my problems.

One poet writes, “There are two kinds of people on earth today, just two kinds of people, no more to say. Not the good and the bad for tis well understood that the good are half bad and the bad are half good. No, the two types of people on earth I mean are the people who lift and the people who lean.” Who are you?

Many people ask this question and have no answer, “What is God’s purpose for my life? Why am I here?” The answer for you is that God wants you to touch broken people’s lives for him, to take this two-dimensional word which is simply black and white on a page and make it real in people’s lives.

Do something today to bring gladness to someone whose pleasures are few. Do something to drive off sadness or cause someone’s dreams to come true. Find time for a neighborly greeting and find time to delight an old friend. Remember, the years are fleeting and life’s latest day will soon end.
Do something today that tomorrow will prove to be really worthwhile.
Help someone to conquer sorrow and greet the new dawn with a smile, for only in kindness and giving of friendship and service and cheer do we learn the pure joy of living, and find Heaven’s happiness here.