Sermons

FILTER BY:

← back to list

Nov 17, 2019

A More Worthy Fast

Passage: Isaiah 58:6-10

Speaker: Ben Seneker

Series: Isaiah

Category: Grace Brevard

Keywords: love, compassion, help, serve, neighbor, fast

In this passage, we find Isaiah speaking ahead to a people of God who have been freed from captivity in Babylon.  How should they respond to their newfound freedom? By holding to religious practices (like fasting) in order to win God’s favor?  Or something else? As we’ll find, Isaiah is in fact reinforcing a thread that runs through the entire Bible and is ultimately shown in the ministry of Jesus: any love of God will naturally translate into a love of neighbor.  

 Order of Worship

CALL TO WORSHIP: 1 John 3:16

READING: Psalm 111:2-3,9

MUSIC: 

MESSAGE:  “A More Worthy Fast”

CENTRAL TEXT: Isaiah 58:6-10

6 “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? 7 Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? 8 Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rearguard. 9 Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’ If you take away the yoke from your midst, the pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness, 10 if you pour yourself out for the hungry and satisfy the desire of the afflicted, then shall your light rise in the darkness and your gloom be as the noonday. 

RESPONSE: Communion

BENEDICTION: Philippians 1:6 & 2 Corinthians 13:14

LEADER: 6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.  

14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy    

ADDITIONAL SCRIPTURES

  • 1 Kings 18:20-21
  • Ezra 8:21-23
  • Jeremiah 29-4-7
  • Matthew 6:16-18
  • Matthew 23:24
  • Matthew 25:34-40
  • Luke 18:9-14
  • James 2:5

ILLUSTRATIONS:

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1. Look back at verses 1-5 of Isaiah 58, what is Isaiah chastising in Israel’s version of religion in those verses?
  2. What is Isaiah calling Israel to repent of (vv. 6-7)?
  3. How does this apply personally to you? Where do you sync?
  4. What will their repentance result in (vv. 8-10)?
  5. In what way is this true for us as well?
  6. What’s similar about Isaiah’s teaching here on fasting and Jesus’s teaching on the same in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:16-18)? 
    1. What does their common word suggest about the easy distortions of religious practice?
  7. How and When does obedience to Jesus turn into mere Religion?
  8. Similar to last week, how does our being loved necessarily and naturally lead us to outwardly love? Who?
  9. Think of a particular person or group that you can do this with?

QUOTES:

  • “I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are and have all the same expectations and demands. And it’s so difficult that basically the only person that ever did it was Christ. The rest of us are very, very far behind.” by Zadie Smith 
  • “...there is no genuine relation with a God that is not at the same time a relation with the brother.” - J.D. Smart
  • “The God who would bear the curse in the Person of His Son cannot be a God who is unconcerned about the economy, about the welfare of a nation, about the triumph of justice…. Joseph Minich (Enduring Divine Absence)
  • “I wonder what later generations will identify as our biggest idol to which we are oblivious? No doubt it will be our economic idolatry and our blindness to consumerism. It will be our lives immersed in mindless consumption in a world where there is so much poverty and hunger.” - Lesslie Newbigin (cited in Michael Goheen’s The Church and its Vocation
  • “The connection between belief and behavior runs right through Christian literature. The two cannot be separated without disastrous results, among them the end of effective evangelism.” - Michael Green
  • “If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth “thrown in”: aim at earth and you will get neither.” - C.S. Lewis
  • “There is a direct relationship between a person’s grasp and experience of God’s grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor. . . Before you can give this neighbor-love, you need to receive it. Only if you see that you have been saved graciously by someone who owes you the opposite will you go out into the world looking to help absolutely anyone in need. Once we receive this ultimate, radical neighbor-love through Jesus, we can start to be the neighbors that the Bible calls us to be.” - Tim Keller (Generous Justice)

BOOKS / DOCS

SERMONS / TALKS: