The Daily Devotional Podcast

Abide in Action - 4 | Isaiah 58:3–12

• Waypoint Church

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This reflection explores the practice of fasting, emphasizing that its purpose is not to manipulate God or earn His favor but to intentionally reorient our whole selves toward His presence. Drawing from Scripture’s examples of fasting in response to encounter, repentance, and grief, it presents fasting as a formative practice that unites body and spirit, deepens dependence on God, and reshapes the heart to reflect His compassion and purposes.

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“May the Lord bless you and keep you — and may His presence guide you this week.”


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Today I'm reading Isaiah fifty eight verses three through twelve.

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We have fasted before you, they say. Why aren't you impressed? We've been very hard on ourselves, and you don't even notice it. I'll tell you why, I respond. It's because you're fasting to please yourselves. Even while you fast, you keep oppressing your workers. What good is fasting when you keep on fighting and quarreling? This kind of fasting will never get you anywhere with me. You humble yourselves by going through the motions of penance, bowing your heads like reeds bending in the wind. You dress in burlap and cover yourselves with ashes. Is this what you call fasting? Do you really think this will please the Lord? No, this is the kind of fasting I want. Free those who are wrongly imprisoned. Lighten the burden of those who work for you. Let the oppressed go free, and remove the chains that bind people. Share your food with the hungry and give shelter to the homeless. Give clothes to those who need them, and do not hide from relatives who need your help. Then your salvation will come like the dawn, and your wounds will quickly heal. Your godliness will lead you forward, and the glory of the Lord will protect you from behind. Then when you call the Lord will answer, Yes, I am here, he will reply quickly. Remove the heavy yoke of oppression, stop pointing your finger and spreading vicious rumors. Feed the hungry, help those in trouble. Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you will be as bright as noon. The Lord will guide you continually, giving you water when you're dry and restoring your strength. You will be like a well watered garden, an ever flowing spring.

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Some of you will rebuild the deserted ruins of your cities, then you'll be known as rebuilder of walls and restorer of homes. The fourth practice is fasting.

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This one in particular is one that really heavily opened my eyes to see how these real life practices don't just influence our physical bodies. They directly interact with the spiritual world and reconnect us with it. So many of us in the States are familiar with the idea of fasting. It had its time in the sun through intermittent fasting in the health world. Ironically that was my gateway into discovering fasting on God's terms. I was actively in a fasting cycle that was transforming my body when I realized through my studies that this practice was almost completely absent from my spiritual life, and, to my knowledge, from much of the church around me. I found this utterly confusing. This practice is throughout the scriptures and heavily practiced by the church as a whole for generations. It really seems like just the last hundred years or so in America that this practice has lost its place in the pattern of our faith. Why? I guess really the question was why fast at all? The answer isn't necessarily explicit, but one thing is abundantly clear. God takes this practice seriously. Isaiah 58 contains some of the strongest language in scripture towards people who fast with the wrong motivation. That may be one reason we struggled to recover this practice today. For a long time my understanding of fasting was pretty self-centered. It was results based. It was Jesus, I really need you to answer this prayer, so to prove how serious I am, I'm not going to eat. I'm super serious here, God. It's a silly caricature, but I think it captures how many of us subconsciously approach fasting. But this is not about seeking result. Results can come, but they're not the point. As I've gotten into the deep end on this, it helped me to sort fasting into three different buckets. The first is fasting as a response to encounter. Jesus, Moses, and Elijah all model this, being baptized by the Spirit, meeting God on Mount Sinai, and seeing God call fire onto the altar, respectively. There are moments where we encounter God so profoundly that fasting becomes the only proper response. Our bodies and spirit were never meant to function separately. Choosing to set aside something as basic as food becomes a tangible way of slowing down, reflecting, and allowing what God has done to sink deeply into our lives. The second is fasting as repentance. Jonah gives us a humorous picture of this when the king of Nineveh calls even the animals to fast in response to God's warning, but I think Joel too really captures the heart behind it. Return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning. Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful. This isn't about punishing ourselves for sin. It's about allowing our hearts to break over the things that break God's heart and returning to him with sincerity and humility. The third is fasting as a response to tragedy. As we truly live, we're guaranteed to experience the frailty of our lives and the depths of the broken nature of the world. Whether through personal tragedy or those around us experiencing it, it will come. How does one cope with that amount of pain? King David's life is filled with examples. In 2 Samuel I, David learns of Saul and Jonathan's death. Then David took hold of his clothes and tore them. So did all the men who were with him. They mourned and wept and fasted until evening for Saul and for Jonathan his son, and for the people of the Lord, and the house of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword. By this point Saul is no friend of David, and yet death is such a tragedy that David and all the men with him fast. The tradition of our scripture has death as the enemy, the thing that Jesus overcame, and the only proper response on our part is to stop eating, to acknowledge that something is not okay and to feel the grief, to embody God's own grief at such loss. This practice costs more than the others we've talked about this week. It asks something tangible of us, to willingly participate without trying to manipulate God or guarantee an outcome. We simply place ourselves before Him. When we stop fasting for what we can get from God, we open the door to discovering something even greater. We begin to experience the beautiful fullness of what God created in us, body and spirit intertwined and wonderfully held together, and his desire to shape every part of us as we learn to abide.

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Before I close in prayer, here's a question to wrestle with.

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Keep me from treating it as a way to earn your favor or manipulate outcomes. Instead, use it to deepen my dependence on you, soften my heart, and remind me that every part of my life belongs in your hands.