A FAST IN WHICH GOD DELIGHTS
For some reason, Lent has been connected with fasting. Read these verses and consider what God's position on fasting truly is.
God asks us, What sort of fast do you think I want from you? Do you think I want you to afflict your own soul and make your own life more empty, heavy, obscure, and dark? Ridiculous Do you think I want you to grovel and castigate yourself, making yourself as weak as a bulrush bending to the ground in the wind? Unthinkable Do you think I want you to wear itchy clothing or sleep on spiked beds? I do not I am not delighted with your misguided attempts to get right with me.
Yahweh wants us to let go of all the wickedness, all the poisonous
thoughts we aim at ourselves or at other people. We are to let go of what galls us and what makes us bitter. Yahweh wants us to release the ropes that tie us to the yoke of heavy burdens in our lives. Yahweh wants us to let the oppressed or crushed people go free people whose lives have been shaken into fragments by trauma, people who have suffered a rupture from God and from proper relationships with other people. Yahweh wants us to pull off that yoke of the old fallen system that drains our energy and darkens our minds and limits our ability to love others freely.
Yahweh then adds ways of keeping a fast in which he delights. We are to share our bread, our kindness, our friendship, our love with those who are famished or hungry. We are not to hide our true nature as loving children of God from other people; we are to carry out the higher work we came to do.
Lord, this Lenten season, may we keep the kind of fast which you choose and in which you delight. Amen.
Paul Reimers, retired pastor
