ScribeLife

Do you remember those parental scoldings that turned into lectures — where all you could do was get comfortable and endure while Mom or Dad went on and on in an attempt to get something through your “thick skull”? These usually came because our repeated behavior revealed we just really didn’t get it, whatever “it” was. Our Father God occasionally launches into one of those; as exhibit number one (can you tell I once was a legal secretary?) I offer Isaiah 58.
Isaiah 58 is a lecture intended to help us “get it” about God’s true values and purposes for fasting, explaining how easy it is to miss his heart altogether in our religious-ness.
A common theme of God’s lectures is how his people turn the festivals, disciplines and acts of worship he prescribed into self-serving rituals instead of pathways to greater love and life with Him and others.
I write in my Bible. After reading a section, I lay the Bible down, sit back and ponder, “What did God just reveal to me about himself?” When the answer comes, I make a note somewhere, either in my Bible study journal or in the margin of the Scriptures, so that a truth about God connects forever in my mind with that section of scripture. Frankly, I’m terrible at memorizing scripture, so this helps me internalize God’s truths in a way that stays with me.
The truth that lives in my heart, and the subtitle I have written for Isaiah 58 is that God meant fasting to be, above all, a fast from selfishness, a turning away from complete pre-occupation with my comfort and even my spiritual performance, so I may know my God, understand His will, and carry out His work of loving people to life. When I fast from business as usual in order to know him, I do something far better than deny myself: I forget myself. In forgetting myself, I can see and hear him more clearly.
A.W. Tozer shared in his most excellent book “The Pursuit of God,” his theory of why Christians, for whom the great veil separating men from God has been torn down, still seem unable to see and know their God. He believes that a veil remains which blinds us to the truth about God, a veil that he describes as “the close-woven veil of the self-life,” woven of the fine threads of what he calls the “hyphenated sins of the human spirit,” such as self-reliance, self-righteousness, self-pity and self-love. These are the things which blind us to God’s true purpose in asking us to deny ourselves and other acts of worship. They often pervert those acts of worship into lifeless religious ritual. Personally, I think God hates religion.
Our Father’s rant in Isaiah 58 greatly validates Tozer’s theory, making it clear that he is not at all pleased with the self-serving “Look at how I deny myself” type of fasting that demands a reward from God while simultaneously failing to effectively love and serve others. My personal conclusion to Tozer’s theory and God’s words is that God’s preferred way to destroy the veil of self is not for you to to make a show of denying yourself, putting yourself on your own cross, but to be so busy loving God and others that self dies while you’re not looking. And he promises in Isaiah 58 that if you will fast in such a way, he will provide you with all the healing and blessing you could ever desire. Get it now?