The True Fast (Isaiah 58:6-9) Series

The True Fast (Isaiah 58:6-9)

Morning Lent Prayer, Day 5

Introduction

There is a moment in every spiritual season when God shifts the conversation. We enter Lent with familiar disciplines, fasting from food, simplifying our schedules, spending more time in prayer, and we assume these acts alone please God. But on Day 5 of our journey, the prophet Isaiah brings us a word that stops us in our tracks.

Isaiah 58 opens with a people who are fasting and yet frustrated. They cry out to God, wondering why He does not respond to their religious effort. "Why have we fasted, and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?" (Isaiah 58:3, NIV). God's answer is both honest and searching. He tells them their fasting has turned inward. It serves their rituals, not their neighbors. It produces religious appearance, not transformed lives.

Then God reframes everything. He asks a question that reshapes what fasting means: "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen?" (Isaiah 58:6, NIV). What follows in verses 6 through 9 is one of the most direct descriptions in all of Scripture of what God considers genuine worship. It is not a rejection of prayer or fasting. It is a redirection. God is saying that the disciplines of Lent must flow outward into the world or they remain incomplete.

This sermon walks through three movements drawn from Isaiah 58:6-9. Each one builds on the last, and together they describe a fast that God both sees and responds to.

1. Breaking the Chains of Injustice

"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?" (Isaiah 58:6, NIV)

The first thing God names is injustice. Not poverty in the abstract, not suffering at a distance, but the specific systems and situations that bind people and keep them from living with dignity. The language here is physical and deliberate. Chains. Cords. Yokes. These are not accidental conditions. They are imposed. And God calls His people to work against them.

This is not a new instruction. God said the same thing centuries before through the same prophet: "Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow." (Isaiah 1:17, NIV). Notice the verbs. Learn. Seek. Defend. Take up. Plead. These are active postures. Justice does not happen to you. You pursue it.

In the New Testament, James echoes this directly. "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world." (James 1:27, NIV). Pure religion has a social address. It finds the people who have been overlooked and shows up for them.

So what does this mean for Lent? It means that fasting from food while ignoring the neighbor who cannot afford food is not the fast God has chosen. It means that forty days of personal devotion must include an honest examination of where injustice exists in your community, your city, and your own habits of looking away. The fast God chooses requires your attention, your voice, and your willingness to be inconvenienced by someone else's need.

Ask yourself honestly: whose yoke are you positioned to loosen this season? You do not need to solve systemic injustice today. But you are called to take one step toward someone who is bound, because that step, taken in faith, is itself an act of worship.

2. Sharing Our Bread with the Hungry

"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 them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?" (Isaiah 58:7, NIV)

The second movement is intensely practical. God does not speak in generalities here. He names four specific acts: share your food, provide shelter, clothe the naked, and do not turn away from your own family. Each one requires proximity. You have to be close enough to someone to see their hunger, their homelessness, their bare shoulders in the cold.

Jesus made this same point in Matthew 25, and the weight of His words is unmistakable. "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." (Matthew 25:35, NIV). When the disciples ask when they ever saw the Lord hungry or thirsty or a stranger, He answers plainly: "Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me." (Matthew 25:40, NIV).