Is assembling for worship a genuine, heartfelt joy for you? Or is it something you 'get through' with a show of enthusiasm but no real affection? God has intended his worship to be a delight and a joy to his people, not drudgery to be endured. Christians are people who have been brought to know God by the work of Jesus Christ and as a result delight to worship him and fellowship together.
Isaiah chapter 58. Cry aloud, spare not. Lift up your voice like a trumpet. Tell my people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins. Yet they seek me daily and delight in all my ways as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
They ask of me the ordinances of justice. They take delight in approaching God. Why have we fasted, they say, and you have not sinned? Why have we afflicted our souls, and you take no notice? In fact, in the day of your fast you find pleasure and exploit all your laborers.
Indeed, you fast for strife and debate, and to strife with the feast of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high. Is it a fast that I've chosen a day for a man to afflict his soul? Is it to bow down his head like a burash to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast and an acceptable day to the Lord?
Is this not the fast that I have chosen to lose the bones of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free and that you break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out when you see the naked that you cover him and not hide yourself from your own flesh? Then your light shall break forth like the morning. Your healing shall spring forth speedily and your righteousness shall go before you. The glory of the Lord shall be your rare God.
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 mist, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, if you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness, and your darkness shall be as the noon day. The Lord will guide you continually and satisfy your soul in drought and strengthen your bones. You shall be like a watered garden and like a spring of water whose waters do not fail.
Those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. If you turn away your food from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holiday and call the Sabbath a delight, the holiday of the Lord honorable, and shall honor him not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words, then you shall delight yourself in the Lord, and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth, and feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father the mouth of the Lord has spoken let us pray our dear God us is a prayer of confessional God and repentance. Our hearts are hard. We confess our ignorance, O God.
We confess that we do not understand and we do not see. So we come before you because you are the light. We come before you as those coming to a good shepherd. We ask that you may lead us this morning. We ask that Lord, you may draw our hearts to yourself.
We ask, oh God, that you may increase our faith. We ask, oh God, that you may persuade us to believe the things that your mouth has spoken. In Jesus' name we plead, amen. In this remarkable chapter that is filled with such beautiful imagery, You know, you have these people who are, they're slumped over, they're so somber, they're beating themselves, and it ends with people that are riding on the high hills of the earth. There are two kinds of people in this world, and this passage speaks of it.
And in this chapter, what you find is a loving God and he's urgently calling his people to abandon everything that doesn't satisfy and then to enter into his most satisfying and beautiful ways. And there's this trumpet call at the very beginning in verse one that calls us away from everything that deprives us of the blessings of God. And The central issue in Isaiah chapter 58 really reveals the essence of Christianity and its delight in the Lord. And he speaks of misplaced delight. The word delight appears four times in this text.
It is mentioned in verse 2 and in verses 13 and 14 and there's a contrast of two kinds of delight in Isaiah chapter 58. And that's the question that's here. In the previous chapter of Isaiah, in chapter 57, we learned about the God who is in the highest of the heavens and he inhabits eternity. And that great and mighty and perfect God condescends and he dwells with the humble and the contrite He comes down to the broken people of this world and he blesses them and so Isaiah is continuing on with this picture and he and and Isaiah ends chapter 58 with this with this remarkable picture of riding on the high hills of the earth. I had one of my grandsons came up to me this morning and I said, high hills of the earth, and he knows what that means.
He said, you mean on a motorcycle? Yes, on a motorcycle, on a horse, in a car, on your feet, with your hiking boots, on a skateboard, whatever. Your Christian rides on the high hills of the earth wherever he is, and it's such a remarkable picture that's here that really defines what it means to partake of heavenly glory and then how that happens. And what we have here in Isaiah 58 is you have, on the one hand in the first part of the chapter, these people, they're acting like it's a delight, but it's not really a delight to them. It's just a somber program where their whole view of God is that God is there to take from you, your happiness.
But there's another view of God that's presented here. You have those who are religious but without delight, and then you have those who truly do delight. And in this whole scheme, Isaiah uses two illustrations to explain what he means. And the first illustration that he gives is the illustration of fasting You know what what does it look like to be so religious and fast, but have no delight What's that like and then he moves to the celebration of the Sabbath? I don't think that fasting and the celebration of the Sabbath are the two central matters of this text.
Well, they are critical and there's much to learn, both about fasting and about the celebration of the Sabbath. But the central matter really is delight. It's all this religious activity where there's no delight and So the prophet here is confronting the people and that's why it opens well up with tell my people their Transgression in verse 1 you see that Tell my people their transgression. And their transgression is not that they're not fasting. Their transgression is not that they're not keeping the Sabbath.
They are fasting. They are keeping the Sabbath. That's not the problem. The problem is delight in God, in their fasting, and in their Sabbath keeping. Now Zechariah chapter 7 verses 1 through 7 strikes to the heart of what Isaiah is saying Isaiah is prophesying over a hundred years before the Babylonian captivity Jeremiah is prophesying just before the Babylonian captivity he sees the armies of Nebuchadnezzar coming and and he ministers to the people during the time of the siege and then the time of the captivity and then afterwards he's prophesying over a 40-year span.
He's kind of picking up Isaiah's message here, but here's what he says in Zechariah 7 verse 5 say to all the people of the land and the priests When you fasted and mourned on the fifth and 11 months during those 70 years Did you really? Fast for me When you eat and when you drink, do you not eat and drink for yourselves? All those years, they were fasting and eating and drinking and celebrating the Sabbath for themselves, not because of their delight in God. And so This passage of scripture is here for us to give us our instructions about how we ought to engage all the things that we do in the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. And in verse one it begins with this command, And it's a command to cry out against transgression.
Cry aloud, spare not, lift up your voice like a trumpet. Tell my people their transgression and the house of Jacob their sins. Now, the word that Isaiah uses here is a word that marks intensity to cry out with your throat with a vehemence, to bark, to be a watchman, to say it really, really clearly. And there are three images that he uses to describe this function, and it really tells us how serious it is. Cry out is the first term, and it's to proclaim from the throat, to use the full stretch of the voice, like a thunderbolt from heaven to speak of the sin.
Now, I pray that the Lord would use these words to be like a thunderbolt. I know my words can't be like a thunderbolt unless the Holy Spirit of God makes them that way. But these words are designed to be a thunderbolt to your heart, to strike to the heart of everything that you're thinking and doing. The second term is spare not. In other words, don't hold back because sin always needs resistance and it's for preachers in order to resist sin, to stand in the way, to throw their bodies in the way, maybe get run over by it, but to stand before the people of God and say, not that way, go this way, for their blessing.
And then he says, lift up your voice like a trumpet. So that's loud. He's talking about The Hebrew shofar horn that was allowed to be heard for long distances. And he's really calling for the crying out like the watchman. You know, in Ezekiel 33, he speaks of this in verse 3, where the watchman sees the sword coming against the land and he blows a trumpet among the people.
This is what watchmen are supposed to do. I stand here as a watchman you know before you not with my own message but with a message from this holy book that God has given to us. But he tells them not just the way to cry out, but what to cry out about. Tell my people their transgression. To point the finger at the real problem.
To identify the transgression. And I think this should just help us to recognize something that we from time to time struggle with and that is don't despise the person, the preacher that makes a commotion about the sins that exist in the church or in your own life. Don't despise them when they raise their voices. You know, we live in an age where everybody wants the preachers just to be so ironic and just so, you know, so friendly, you know, so accessible, you know, and I think we all can appreciate why we often think like that, but we should never despise the man that cries out with a thunderbolt in his mouth because it's part of the function that God has given his people. And you know it hurts the church when we don't allow the conscience to be touched or troubled.
And this is one of the sins that ministers often have. They're afraid to touch the conscience. They're afraid to put the finger in the wound. It's a great sin of ministers who shrink back from saying what God has said in order to protect their own positions or their own reputations or this friendly interaction that they might have with people that could be destroyed by calling out the sins of the people that exist. So I pray that we're a people, we have more delight in the Lord than we do in our sins, and we're willing to be confronted by them.
Perhaps this passage is gonna confront all of us in some way. I think it ought to, I know it does me. And then the Lord turns from his admonition in verse one to Isaiah to a description of the people in verse two. So you can see what was happening. Yet They seek me daily and delight to know my ways as a nation that did righteousness and did not forsake the ordinance of their God.
They ask of me ordinances of justice. They take delight in approaching God. And here the Lord, through Isaiah, is acknowledging their passion for the fasting and the celebration of the Sabbath. And they are, they're professing that they have a delight in approaching God. But the key to understanding verse 2 is in the phrase as a nation.
Do you see that in the text? They delight to know my ways as a nation. In other words, or as the King James renders it, as if they were a nation that did righteousness. That's how the ESV translates it. The whole idea is that they're acting as if they delight, but they don't really delight.
And you can see it played out in the way that he explains how they're doing it how they're how they're engaging their their religious life and that He's exposing their religious shows and how they act like they're delighted to seek the ordinances of justice. But they're not really seeking justice. They're just seeking their own self-congratulations and their own self-exaltation. Now one of the things we learned from this passage and also in Isaiah chapter 56 is that Sabbath keeping and prayer and fasting are what God calls ordinances of justice. There are ways that God brings justice into the world.
They bring actual social justice, not only to bring justice to your souls, in the sense that they bring right thinking and right living to your life. As you pray, God modifies and changes your life. As you fast, He changes you. As you celebrate the Sabbath, He changes your life and He recalibrates your whole thinking about everything and it causes justice to spread in the world. So they are ordinances of justice, but what God is doing here is He's unmasking their appearances and He's correcting them and He's really, He's treating them like hypocrites but you can see He's mocking them really.
He's speaking of just how ridiculous they look. And this is a truth that you find everywhere in scripture. There are always Two groups of people who gather with the people of God. They're the ones who have delight in their soul. They love God from their heart.
And then there are the strangers who perhaps believe in the technical matters and they involve themselves in the duties and the structure and they like it. But they really don't have any delight in it at all. There are always two groups of people. It says that they seek, in other words, it's a word to tread, they delight in the intellectual ways of God. They're kind of like, you know, theology walks.
They just, they just like the stuff, you know, and the discussions that, that occur as a role. So on paper, you know, they, they desire that God would regulate their worship, but in their, in their lives, there's really no delight in it. They're just going through the motions. And then it says, they ask of me the ordinances of justice, and then this ordering of justice isn't really accomplishing justice at all. And we learn that as we go deeper into the passage.
Which takes us to verse 3, which we observe their, sort of their proud boasting about their appearances. And he, and so they respond, and they say, Lord, why have we fasted? And you have not seen. Why have we afflicted our souls and you take no notice? In other words, there's no fruit in it.
There's no effect of it. In other words, it's not really accomplishing justice. It's not really issuing in any kind of delight or change or fruit bearing or anything like that. They're saying, we fasted, but you're not doing anything. You're not helping us.
We're pulling the slot machine but there's nothing coming out. You know we're pressing all the buttons but where's the money, where's the blessing? They're incredulous and they're actually blind to their deadness and their hypocrisy. And this is one of the great problems of human beings who get involved in religion or maybe they grow up in it and they're like children who always went to church their whole life and They're just they don't see their deadness you know you know maybe the Lord has this passage in front of us to just shake anyone here out of their sense of inebriation and deadness about their true condition and he uses it over the word delight in order to smoke out the dead and But they're not clear really seemingly that they're putting on an outward show and they're and they're boasting in their fasting and it's very much like the Pharisees in Luke chapter 18 verse 12 where the Pharisee stands and he says, I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of all that I get.
They're just like that. They're very proud about their ways and their activities because the chief end of their religion is to glorify themselves and to delight themselves in themselves. But in the next phrase God gives the reasons why their fasting is futile. And here's where God picks up some of the mocking language. You know, Isaiah has this kind of language in a lot of different places.
The Lord Jesus Christ speaks this way in different ways as well. But he says this, he says, in fact, in other words, you're doing this as if it's a delight, and he says, no, in fact, it's not like that at all. In fact, in the day of your fast, you find pleasure and exploit all your workers. Indeed, you fast for strife and debate, and to strike with the fist of wickedness, you will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high. This is kind of the first shot against the bow that God brings to them.
In fact, He's bringing them back to reality, They're not seeing it. It's a reality check. And he's saying you're not really as you appear. Because their fasting wasn't really increasing their mercy. They were harsh with their workers.
They were relentless. They were selfish. They were actually exploiting their labors. He says in fact in the day of your fast you find pleasure and exploit all your labors. You know what?
They're just mean employers. They're doing all this fasting, but they're still yelling at people and throwing their weight around and acting like they're the kings of the earth. There's no compassion or mercy in the way that they conduct their business. And then they're exploiting their labor, after that not only are they exploiting their labors, but they're fasting for strife and debate. You fast for strife and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness.
Now what does that mean? There are probably at least two ways that this happens. And the first is to prove how holy they were. They wanted to be so superior, so godly. You know, one of the men in our church said It's like they're just trying to have the dirtier the dirtiest sackcloth You know to have the bloodiest back they could get just to prove how righteous they were and make sure everybody knows it But but they're also You know seeking to win at life.
They're seeking to use their fasting to dominate other people. It's using your fasting as a selfish end. To get your way, to be first, to put yourself in the power position, to pull the arm of the slot machine to get more, to belittle your brother, to make him fail, and to make you succeed, to fast because you hate someone, Because you want to exalt yourself. Putting yourself in the position to win the debate. You know, you know how that works, you know.
Someone is doing something against you and you start fasting against them. And There may be some kernel of righteous Motives, but the bottom line is you just don't want to be put down You want to be exalted? That's why you do it And so you have to get beyond You have to get beyond this kernel of righteousness, you know, that sometimes exists in the midst of our religious duties and why we pray for people or why we pray against certain things. Is it for love? Do we fast in order to promote love for the exaltation of Jesus Christ?
Or to exalt ourselves so that we win? It's kind of like fasting to win. For yourself. For your own glory. This is why the Lord Jesus Christ speaks of this in Matthew chapter 6 and He uses illustrations, for example, of giving charitable deeds.
He says in Matthew 6, 1, take heed that you do not do your charitable deeds before men to be seen by them, otherwise you have no reward from your father in heaven. You know, you want to do a charitable deed, but really, what you really like about it is that somebody knows about it. And then he gives instructions. He says, therefore when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets." And he tells them why they do it. That you may have glory for men.
He says, don't be like them. They have their reward. And then the Lord Jesus uses the example of prayer and he says, don't be like the hypocrites for they love to stand praying in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets that they might be seen by men. You have people, charitable giving because they want glory from and then Jesus turns and he says that you might be seen by men Through prayer and then he speaks of fasting the Lord Jesus Christ is just doing exposition on this text and he says Moreover when you fast don't be like the hypocrites With a sad countenance He's describing this verse in Isaiah with a sad countenance and now he's mocking them just like Isaiah They disfigure their faces. How ridiculous.
You know how when your children do that, it's just so, it's ridiculous, isn't it? You just have to sort of wait it out when they disfigure their faces in such immaturity, you know, and they'll, hopefully they'll get over it. But he's, he's actually belittling and mocking the way that they're fasting. And he says, you know, they have their reward. Don't be like them.
And So it's this fasting for your own fleshly desires, to fast out of your contentions because you want to be great. It's fasting to get more work out of your people, you know. Fasting to make more money, fasting to dominate other people. James I think is referring to this situation that you find in Isaiah where the people are saying, how come we get nothing out of this? When James said, you ask and you do not receive.
Why? Because you want to spend it on your pleasures. It's another commentary on Isaiah chapter 58. And so God continues to speak of it in verse five. And God continues to sort of mock, mock them.
He says, is this a fast that I've chosen? In other words, did I ask you to fast like this? He said, did I ask you to afflict your soul? Did I ask you to bow your head down like a bull rush and spread out sackcloth and ashes? He says would you call this a fast?
Would you call this an acceptable day of the Lord? And what he's saying is there you are. You're all bowed down like a reed. You're beating yourself. This is not what I asked you to do.
My fasts are for true delight. He's just speaking of how they went through the motions and how they were doing it. And what was happening is God was not hearing them. And it wasn't satisfying. It was really no fun.
It was just sort of this kernel of fun, you know, that they were having. But it was because of their own glory that they were trying to get out of it. So they're putting on these outward airs. And then God Turns in verse 6 and he gives them instructions for their fasting he tells him no no no it's not I didn't mean for fasting to be like this Here's how I meant it to be that's verses 6 and 7 look at it with me Is this not the fast that I've chosen other words. This is the fast that I like.
This is the fast that I want my people to be involved in. You know, wipe the scowl off your face, get rid of your flogging material, and fast like this. To loose the bonds of wickedness. To undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free, that you break every yoke, Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and that you bring your into your house the poor who are cast out? When you see the naked that you cover him and not hide yourself from your flesh Now, how do you sum all this up?
Well, it's really fasting for the gain of others. It's fasting for love. Not for self-love. It's fasting because you love people who are hurt and are under some kind of affliction. And he's saying, you've been fasting because you love yourself, but I want you to love other people.
Fast for love, not of yourself. Not to exalt yourself, but to exalt others. To bring them out of their bondage and their troubles and the heavy burdens. And so he itemizes all these things and there are there seven There's seven things here seven reasons. You should fast Because God doesn't just say no no no no he also says yes.
Yes. Yes. Yes, and that's what you get in verses 6 and 7. The first is to loose the bonds of wickedness, and I believe he's talking about two things. The wickedness of your own life, to deal with your own sins, to fast and pray for your own sins that you might be loosed from those bonds of wickedness, the things that, the wicked things that you have tied yourselves to that you need to get free of.
But It's not just your own wickedness, it's for other people's wickedness as well, other people who are trapped in sin to pray for their freedom. And then the second is relief from burdens, to undo the heavy burdens. And he doesn't really give a clear definition of this, but you know what it's like to be burdened? To have heavy burdens on your shoulders? There are various kinds of burdens that we bear.
From injustices that happen to us, or they might even be self-inflicted burdens. The Lord Jesus Christ loves to lift your self-inflicted burdens. He's so kind that way. You know, He's not like us where we think, well, You made your bed, you gotta sleep in it. You know, in a lot of ways, God doesn't really operate like that.
I mean, He does allow His people to suffer under His chastisement. But He does it in order to get them out of their trouble. To lift them out of that condition. And then there's the removal of oppression to let the oppressed go free and that you break every yoke. The fourth is to share your food with the hungry.
It says in verse 7, is it not to share your bread with the hungry? And then fifthly, to bring in the poor, that you may bring to your house those the poor who are cast out. This I think has to do with lodging and food for people who've been thrown out of their accommodations. You know, it's not just the people who are kind of in a nice transition. You know, they're poor.
They don't have anything. They, you might think they don't deserve this. God says, no. No, fast for these people. And then to clothe the naked, number six.
When you see the naked that you cover him. And then number seven, to take care of your own family and not hide yourself from your own flesh. In other words, fasting for the blessing of your family, which when you look at the landscape of family life and the broken relationships that can exist, the tragic lack of forgiveness, lack of mercy that can exist in families. You can see why he would say that. Don't fast for the punishment of your family members, fast for them because you love them.
This is, I think, spoken of again in 1 Timothy 5 verse 8, where the Apostle Paul says to that young pastor living in Ephesus, He said, but if anyone doesn't provide for his own and especially those of his own household he's denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. And we often, because of offenses, because of disappointments, we often lose our care for our relatives and we want to put them in the box of those who don't deserve any blessing and they're not going to really get it from us. You know when you go and you're with family members and it can be very very difficult You know someone came to me recently said oh, this is this is so hard. I've already been rejected so many times You know this was a text that I received what should I do I've been spurned and Deborah and I were together and we wrote, out love them, out grace them, out joy them, out serve them, out mercy them, and out live them. Maybe not the out live them, maybe that wasn't appropriate.
But it is appropriate in this sense that God really has called us to love our whole life long. We really should outlive the offenses and not take them so personally. You know Solomon in Ecclesiastes says, you know, don't be upset if you hear your servant slandering you. Just let it go right over your head. He said, now remember you've done this too.
So when you hear your servant maligning you, just forget about it. Forget about it. So this is fasting for the blessing and the benefit of others. So what you see here is that there are two kinds of fasts. And one is, there are two different kinds of fasts that reflect two different kinds of people.
And The one kind of fast has a vision of God that wants to make you miserable. And he just wants you to hang your head and bend down like a reed and just be so pious and religious more than anybody else. Those are the people that think that God wants to deprive them of something. But then there are others that they're delighted. And that's we're going to get to that in this next section.
It's the Jesus section, you know, his commands aren't burdensome. They're there for your blessing and The Lord Jesus Christ Illustrates this in many different ways You know he says if you love me you'll keep my commandments if you delight in my love You'll you'll just do you'll just do what I want to do. I want you to do When the Lord Jesus with Peter was with Peter He asked Peter three times do you love me? And he said well if you look if you love me Then tend my lambs, you know love is not a dour, depressing thing. Love is a hapifying thing.
If you love me, if you're happy in me, then teach my people. Bring the instruction of the word of God, feed my flock because you love me, because you love my words. And it's such a delight to speak of them. Love from a pure heart. So Isaiah 58 is representing two different views of God that can be seen in the church pews.
And one contends that God wants to deprive you. The other is that God wants to bless you. And His ways are the gateways of His delight. And fasting is one of these illustrations that He gives to us. One views holiness as taking away something good from you.
And the other one views holiness as the greatest blessing in the world. And that's the difference between a believer and an unbeliever. Now then as we turn the corner in this passage, after these instructions, there are promised blessings. There are 14 blessings that are promised. And What we learned from these is that fasting and the keeping of the Sabbath Was really designed to be a fountain of blessing in your life so that you would love your neighbor That you would lift him out of the pit to diminish your love for this world and your own self-exaltation and to increase your love for God.
When you love God, you are now participating in justice because you participated in an ordinance of justice, not an ordinance of domination for yourself. This is the love of God. Now when we get to the end of this chapter, it ends with this beautiful picture of somebody riding on the high hills of the earth. You know, you saw this picture of the man, he's bent down like a reed, he has a sad countenance. That's one kind of person.
And then you have this other person. He's riding on the high hills of the earth, no matter what he's riding on. Because Jesus Christ is such a delight to him. He hungers for his kingdom. He wants to set aside everything that contradicts that kingdom.
And so in verse 8 through 12 are these blessings. Now I'm counting 14 of them. There's a possible overlap of one of them, but however you count them. There are a lot of them Okay, and here God is just trying to emphasize this you God is so kind in the way that he he gives you a vision of of something from one facet and then another and then another. It's like a diamond.
There are just so many facets and here he's gonna get you around 14 facets of this diamond of the delight of God And so he wants you to see it in different ways. He's not content to just give you one illustration and then walk away. He wants to explain it in detail. And you know, particularly those of you who have little children, This should be so instructive. God has designed his word to give you thousands of ways to explain the beauty of God.
And here We just have 14 of them. They're all over the Bible. And you know, you who are particularly raising little children, the most important thing you can do as you're raising your little children is to help them to see the beauty of the Lord. That you would spend your days explaining all these facets. You'll never get through all the facets of the beauty of God.
The family life should be the singular context where the beauty of the Lord is declared. And God gives you the words in scripture to help you to understand it. You know, when Deborah and I got married and our first child came into our house, You know, that's what we wanted to do. And so we sang to her. We took her to the high hills of the earth with us.
And then we got another one, and then got another one, and then got another one. But really our whole hope was somehow to declare the beauty of the Lord. You know, I shudder to think of how imperfectly I did that and how imperfectly I continue to do it, but let me say this. Check your heart to see if this is the kernel, if this is the heart of the matter in your religion, to delight yourself in the Lord. It is the greatest gift you can give your children.
There is nothing greater. And as it turns out, the beauty of the Lord is exemplified in Jesus Christ. And that's why he ought to be the center of all of our life. And anything that distracts from him, we should remove. So here are the blessings.
First of all, in verse 8 there, 4, there's light, there's healing, there's righteousness going before you, and then Fourthly, there's protection by the glory of God. And these are marks of revival in the heart that loves God. And, you know, verse 3 explains what they were feeling. You know, there was no blessing in it at all. But now the light is breaking forth.
You know, this is why the Lord Jesus Christ said, I am the light of the world. And if you believe in me, you'll have the light of life. That light of life is only found in Jesus Christ. And he says that the light will break forth. It's representative of the presence of God.
And the word that he uses is the word that Moses uses in Genesis chapter 7 verse 11. When you have the flood waters breaking out of the earth, it's like that. And then he says you're healing. Now it's personal healing. Your healing will spring forth speedily.
And the word that he uses there is reflecting of a whole image that everybody in this room understands. And it's the growing of flesh over a wound. You know how it slowly grows? Over the wound God made our bodies to heal and God God is always healing his children and he's saying when you know that delight and you fast for delight and you celebrate the Sabbath for delight, it's like healing is happening in your life. You know we're a broken people.
We have many things that have collapsed. God is healing us. He spends his whole life long healing us. And He's given you a flesh wound to show you what He is like. That He would cause it to grow over and your skin would be protected again over time.
Now he takes all of our life long for that. But there's a conditional promise. If you take away the yoke from your midst and pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness. Now this is a restatement of verse 6 of the breaking of every yoke, but there are conditions here that are communicated. There are conditions for this blessing.
And the first condition is that you must put off something to take away the yoke from your midst. In other words, stop the abusive and harsh behavior toward your neighbor. If you say you love God and hate your brother, you're a liar. In the harshness. And the second condition is is the pointing of the finger.
And this has to do with the upwelling in your heart of contempt toward your brother. And you point the finger and you're mocking him. You think of your brother and you mock him in your heart. And you point your finger at all these people. It's the quickest way to lose your delight and your blessing.
And then there's a third condition, the third thing we must put off is speaking wickedness. Ceasing from speaking wickedness, from slander, From exalting yourself and putting the other person down by using your speech to diminish someone else's good And he says if you cease from these things God will do something and here and that brings us to the fifth blessing in verse nine you'll have the presence of God and the ear of the Lord verse nine then you shall call and the Lord will answer you shall cry and he will say here I am what but the people in Judah they were calling they were crying they were bowing down, they were beating themselves with sticks, and they weren't being heard. They knew it. But God says, no, that's not what I want. I want to hear you.
And the next blessing is that light will dawn, verse 10, If you extend your soul to the hungry and satisfy the afflicted soul, then your light shall dawn in the darkness. Now, there are a couple things I want us to notice about verse 10. He first of all speaks in the first phrase about extending your soul. What does it mean to extend your soul? You would think that he would have said, if you extend your food or if you extend your money, but he doesn't start there.
He starts with your soul, he starts with your love, he starts with your heart, he starts with the ground of loving kindness and mercy. And your soul precedes your gift. But often what happens to us in our self congratulating quest in life is that we give the gift first, but there's not much soul that goes with it. It's pride. It's the desire to be seen and heard and to have glory for men as Jesus said And then the seventh blessing is guidance and the Lord will guide you continually No, he leads you through the Confusions and the ambiguity of your life the tough situations.
He's saying he will lead you he will lead you I mean do you I hope you find comfort in that The Lord is declaring that he will lead his people Isn't that wonderful you can count on it If you know and love Jesus Christ, if you delight in him, you might cry out to him and say, oh Lord, open my eyes. That would be appropriate. But know this, He will lead you. He will feed you. He will feed his flock like a shepherd.
He'll gather the lambs in his arms and he'll carry them in his bosom and he'll gently lead those who are with young. He will lead you. You know, as you go out into the day today, I pray that God gives such a sense of leadership that you know, you know that God is leading your every step that He's sovereign over all of these steps, and He loves you, and He will never leave you or forsake you, and He will always lead you and guide you by His right hand, and He'll always carry you in His bosom. And there's a very special promise for those who are with young. For those who are with young, in Isaiah 40, He says He will gently lead those who are with young.
He might be talking about the moms and the dads here, those who are with young, the gentle leadership of a husband toward a wife with her young. He's a gentle shepherd. That's the kind of patriarchy the Bible speaks about. He gently leads those who are with young. And Then he's the eighth blessing is that He will satisfy you and satisfy your soul in drought in other words you might go through the drought you might pass through the fire And he'll lead you through the right he may not always protect you from the drought but he'll lead you through the drought and he'll satisfy you in the midst of the drought.
And the ninth blessing is strength. He'll strengthen your bones. This has to do with physical strength and stamina. We've often forgotten about the impact of godliness on the human body. Doctors will tell you that most people that come in to see them, they don't really have physical problems.
They have spiritual problems. They have fears. They have dread. They have hatred. And they don't trust God.
And that's often the source of it and so they give them pills But what they really need Our delights Strength to your bones and the tenth blessing is growth You'll be like a water garden like a spring of water whose waters whose waters do not fail. Now Isaiah does what he does all over his prophecy. He's always taking you to the watered garden. He takes you to the desert and then he takes you to the watered garden he shows you the jackals and he shows you the lambs that he carries and You'll you'll grow the refreshments come from the outside in the feeding of the Word of God, and prayer and fellowship and the preaching and the fellowship of the saints. And the eleventh blessing is rebuilding.
Those from among you shall build the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations. And you shall be called Repairer of the Breach, the restorer of streets to dwell." In other words, God involves you in a work of blessing in the world and you're building up things, you're repairing things. He speaks of these waste places, these things that have just been wasted and ruined, the things that have collapsed. You become a rebuilder of the things that have been wasted.
I view us as people like that. We're here to rebuild the old waste places. And then the thirteenth blessing is the raising up of foundations, the foundations that have been gone for many generations, things that you don't see anymore, the foundations of the true gospel, the foundations of true family life and what it means to be a man and a woman and a father and a mother, the foundational principles that man has made in the image of God. These are foundations that we're building upon. They've been lost.
Where are they? You know, when you're rebuilding foundations that haven't been seen in many generations, people look at it and they say, that's weird. And then they say, you're weird. And then we say, no, we're bringing something back beautiful. And we say wait around and see if there's in beauty and the and the 14th blessing is the breaches are Repaired you shall be called a repairer of the breach a breach is a part of a wall or a dam that is broken it's just gone And everything has run out of it and there's just no there's no resource left You repair the breach and the and the dam fills back up with water and there fish again and there's nourishment again, and there's irrigation again.
That's what the church is designed to do. And then you'll be a restorer of the streets. I like that, restoration. I've loved, I've always loved the word restore. Ever since I was a new Christian, restoration is to turn something back to what it once was, to restore its beauty, to take an old dilapidated building and make it beautiful again, to take an old car and make it beautiful.
I always loved to do things like that. And then he turns to delight in the Sabbath. He's spoken of the undelighted and now he turns to the delighted. And again, I believe Isaiah is painting this picture of delight and he uses the fasting and the Sabbath as illustrations of it. That he's not just speaking of fasting in an isolated way and then now talking about the Sabbath.
But he's talking about this whole picture of the beauty of the Lord and the delight that God draws his people into. And so in verse 13 we learn about this delight. He says if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath from doing your pleasure on my holy day and call the Sabbath a delight the holy day of the Lord honorable, and shall honor him, not doing your own ways, nor finding your own pleasure, nor speaking your own words." Now there are many conditional clauses in this verse, but he speaks first of all of if you turn so some if you do something something will happen if you turn away your foot from the Sabbath away from doing your own pleasure on my holy day. In other words, if you turn away your foot from trampling on the Sabbath, if you turn away from celebrating the Sabbath with a cold heart, without delight, if you turn away your Sabbath from that and you call the Sabbath a delight, then something will happen. The foot is turned from a false pleasure to a true pleasure.
The foot is turned to an obligation, a duty, just something that's kind of hemmed in by religious functionality and tradition. You turn your foot away from that And you celebrate the Sabbath the way that God designed it for delight and with the various prohibitions and the affirmations that he has given for the Sabbath. And what he's saying is that God desires to bring you true pleasure and there's a way that you can celebrate the Sabbath that that's a downgrade on pleasure and delight And so he calls us here these two verses to live very carefully to think very distinctively about the Sabbath and not just to regard it as something that we already know everything about. I mean we go to church all the time right? Probably everybody here goes to church every Sunday or most every Sunday but but he he is talking to us who go to church he's not talking about those who don't he's some of those who do and so just be very careful he says turn from doing your own pleasure in other words it's a it's a completely different kind of day.
It's not a day that's designed to feed yourself on your pleasures the way you like it. It's actually to feed yourself on the pleasures of God. And often the greatest impediment to that is our preparing for it, our anticipation for it so the Sabbath can become, you know, kind of the day of hassle. Because we didn't prepare for it, We didn't use what the Bible speaks of as a day of preparation. And then he says, on my holy day, the Sabbath is his holy day.
And he's saying it's not like any other day. The Sabbath is designed to be evacuated of normal life you go into a completely different life a Completely different way of thinking a completely different world. It's his holy day. It's his day not yours but every time God delivers you from your day and your way and your hey he always gives you a better way and a better day and better hey all the time that's the way God is he's not he didn't want to beat you He doesn't want you to be bowing down. He's, that's not why he gave you this day, to be a burden.
It's a very special day and he says he calls it holy, sanctified. Now, in the Bible, many things are called holy. But now we learn that there is a holy day Now I'd like to just sort of back up and give you sort of a very rapid theology. If you have a pen, I'm going to give you several passages of scripture that define this holy day. And I'm going to give just a brief sentence about them to establish the significance of what Isaiah is saying here.
That we don't pass by these words so lightly and think of them the way that we've always thought about them because most of the church doesn't think biblically about the Sabbath. The first passage of scripture is in Genesis chapter 2 verses 1 through 3. Genesis 2, 1 through 3 speaks to us that the Sabbath day is not rooted in the ceremonial law nor is it even rooted in the Mosaic law, but it's rather rooted in creation that God blessed the Sabbath day and He rested, He made it holy. God did this in Genesis 2, 1-3. Then the next is in Exodus chapter 16 verses 4 & 5 and verses 13 through 30 and in Exodus 16 we we learned that God provides for the Sabbath day that the people will give seven days to work.
In other words, you're supposed to work seven days and then you rest on the last day. Now what God did in the wilderness to prove this and demonstrate it, for 40 years, he provided for them on the Sabbath. He gave them manna They gathered it up on the evening and they and they ate it the next day And they always had enough the entire time plus their clothes didn't wear out. How about that? God pretty he put God told them He would provide for them on that day when they don't work.
Everybody's afraid of not working enough, not having enough provision. God says, no, I'll provide. The third text is Exodus 20 verses 8 through 13. And this is the Ten Commandments. It's the first giving of the law and this is part of the eternal moral law of God.
There are 10 commandments, not 9. A lot of people today think that there are really only nine commandments. But that tenth is really something very, very different. You don't really, it's completely spiritualized, but nothing else is spiritualized. Like you don't spiritualize the commandment about stealing.
You don't spiritualize the commandment about killing, okay? And is it appropriate to spiritualize the command about keeping the Sabbath day just this one To really actually declare with your life and with your mouth that there are no only nine commandments You know it all it's it's always astonished me Then when people put up monuments for the Ten Commandments, you never hear an outcry from the church that says, no, there are only nine, that one about the Sabbath, that's fulfilled in Christ, that does nothing to do with us anymore. It's Well, why doesn't anybody do that? Well, the 10 Commandments contain a fourth commandment That is not abrogate. It's part of the moral law of God.
Now, the interesting thing about Exodus 20 is that the grounding for this commandment in Deuter- in, uh, is- is the, um, is the Exodus and creation. Then in Deuteronomy chapter five verses 12 to 15 there's another stating of the law and there are two grounds of this commandment and that is, the deliver, well it's primarily focused on the deliverance from bondage in Egypt. It's supposed to signify you're being set free from that abuser of the soul, Pharaoh, the devil. And then the fifth text is Isaiah 56, 1 through 8. And here, he's speaking of the times of the Messiah, the days of the New Covenant, where the eunuch will be welcome in the worship of God.
And that there will be people in the New Covenant who are going to be celebrating the Sabbath. All kinds of people. Jews, Gentiles, eunuchs, All the kinds of people who are excluded will be included. And it's there that we learn that these are ordinances of justice. And then in Isaiah chapter 58, we learn it's a day of delight.
And in Nehemiah chapter 13 verses 15 through 21, we learn it's a day when one should cease all commerce. There's an illustration of the commandment in Nehemiah chapter 13 that speaks of why all commerce should be shut down there should not be any buying and selling and the people of God should not force others to buy and sell and work for them. A great challenge in a society which has rolled back their blue laws, because in America There was a day when you could not work on the Sabbath, you could not buy and sell on the Sabbath. You still have a few businesses that close on the Sabbath. Not very many, but the reason they do, they got into that pattern because God had it in this land that there were laws against working and buying and selling on the Sabbath.
We don't live in that day anymore, so what are the people of God going to do? Be the people of justice. Restore justice. Restore delight in the world. Come and celebrate the Sabbath.
Recalibrate your whole mind. Bring on the mind of God. Spend an entire day delighting in God filling your mind with God with thoughts of God and It's the most beneficial thing you can do for your own soul for your own wickedness For your own family and for your nation and for your church It's an ordinance of justice that God has given so that you'd be a blessing in the world. I believe that the rejection of the doctrine of the Sabbath has resulted in so much wickedness in this land because you don't have a people of God who come together and spend an entire day delighting in him. And so their minds aren't washed, cleansed, renewed.
They're not thinking differently like they need to learn how to think on the Sabbath. To set them up for going into the week as completely new men and women because they've thought about God and God alone. Their souls have been so delighted it's all they can think of during the week. I do believe that A key to revival, a key to rolling back the wickedness in our society is the restoration of the celebration of the Sabbath with delight that we find in Isaiah chapter 58. I don't believe there's going to be much revival in your church or mine until there is this great and beautiful, delightful refashioning of our thinking and our minds to the glory of God and the beauty of holiness on the Sabbath day.
So, I mean, my prayer is that when you go out it will be like a day like no other day. Where all day long you're celebrating the beauty of the Lord. You can also go to Matthew chapter 11 and 12 for this where the Lord Jesus Christ is celebrating the Sabbath with his disciples. The Pharisees are saying you're breaking the Sabbath. Jesus says no I'm keeping the Sabbath.
You've just added a bunch of laws on the Sabbath that God did not lay upon His people. You're the ones that are breaking the Sabbath by adding to it. And He led His disciples into a day of delight. That's Matthew chapter 11 and 12. And then in a ninth set of texts, Speak of the Sabbath as a day of preparation, or the day before the Sabbath as a day of preparation.
You can read about that in Matthew 27 verse 62, Mark 15 verse 42, and Luke 23 verse 54, and John 19, 31, and verse 42. I give you these because I want you to under just have some biblical underpinnings of the Sabbath the next the tenth Place to go on scripture is to recognize that the Sabbath changed to the first day of the week go to mark 16 to Luke 24 1 John 21 and 19 and in here you'll find this this matter of the first day of the week. Then 11th, if you go to Acts chapter 20 verses 6 and 7, again you'll find that the disciples came together to break bread on the first day of the week. They came together in Troas to break bread, to celebrate the Lord's Supper, and to hear the preaching. This is what the church began to do.
The apostles changed it to the first day of the week. You can say, well, I don't know what the argument for that is, but that's what the apostles did. And they had authority, we follow the doctrine of the apostles. The 12th is 1 Corinthians 16 verses 1 and 2, this is concerning the collection of the saints, and the idea is when you meet on the Sabbath day you collect. You can read about this in Revelation chapter 1 verses 9 through 11 where the word the Lord's day appears and he's speaking of this first day.
Other texts would be John 5, 9 through 12 In the Old Testament 2nd Chronicles 36 15 through 21 Isaiah 66 22 to 24 Jeremiah 17 21 and 22 Jeremiah 19 27 Jeremiah 25 8 through 12 Ezekiel 4 4 through 6 Leviticus 26 27 through 35 numbers 15 32 through 36 now Jeremiah 19, 27, Jeremiah 25, 8-12, Ezekiel 4, 4-6, Leviticus 26, 27-35, Numbers 15, 32-36. Now There are those among us who would appeal to Colossians chapter 2 verse 16 and say, no the Sabbath, it's not necessary for us to keep the Sabbath. Colossians 2 16 says this, So let no one judge you in food or drink or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths which are a shadow of things to come. But the substance is of Christ. Let no one cheat you of your reward taking delight in false humility." And he goes on and on.
Is this talking about the abrogation of the Sabbath? And the answer to that is no, this is speaking of the abrogation of the ceremonial law. He's speaking of the various Sabbaths, the Sabbath feasts and the things that Christ has obviously fulfilled. And he calls them the Sabbaths and he says they are a shadow of things to come. They are a shadow of Jesus Christ.
This feasting, this gathering of the people, it's a shadow that the Lord Jesus Christ accomplishes. Now, Romans 14 is also used for this purpose, to say that the Sabbath has been abrogated and it doesn't really matter what day you do this. Here's something to think about. First of all, is it possible that this one verse was designed by God in Scripture to nullify dozens of others? Does it nullify the moral law of God?
Does it give us nine commandments and not ten? Was it inaugurated in creation? Was it reaffirmed by Moses? Was it practiced by Nehemiah and celebrated by the Lord Jesus Christ and affirmed by the disciples and the apostles. And you even find in the last book of the Bible, John, the Apostle John on the Island of Patmos, he's in the Spirit on the Lord's Day.
He was delighting in the Lord on that island. And then he says regard the Sabbath a delight that's how you do it In the same way that he said said things about how you fast now he tells you about the Sabbath call the Sabbath a delight and The word he uses is an ex of an exquisite delight like a rich luxury like the like the best thing you can think of you might put in your mouth like a chocolate cake and ice cream for me. And your mouth waters when you think of it. When you come to the Sabbath, your mouth is watering and you say, we're going to sing the songs, we're going to pray, we're going to gather, we're going to celebrate the Lord's Supper, we're going to read the Word of God, to call the Sabbath a delight, to change your whole mentality. It's not to deprive yourself, it's to delight yourself.
And the way that that happens is to call it a delight. In Exodus chapter 20, God gives fathers and mothers the jurisdiction for preparing and executing the Sabbath not ministers That it's fathers and mothers that make sure that their children their sons their daughters their oxen and everybody that works for them in their House they make sure that everybody is celebrating the Sabbath. It's the responsibility of fathers and mothers. And fathers and mothers have one of their greatest duties to create delight in their children that this is a day of delight. And they teach them Psalm 122 verse 1, I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.
Often people don't know how to celebrate the Sabbath or even can even conceive of delighting in God all day because they've never learned how to prepare for it. They've never called it a delight. They just called it a responsibility. And they kind of hung their heads that they had to do it. And then he says, Regard the Sabbath with honor, the holy day of the Lord, honorable.
Now he uses this word, kaved. It means heavy. And it's something of substance, some gigantic gravitational force. But the word is used of heavy with wealth heavy with gold and silver its value is so it's inestimable It's It's the most valuable thing call it honorable Call it something heavy not in a morose way but just Gigantically rich and beautiful think of it like that It's quite likely likely some of us just have to rethink how we thought about the Sabbath. To anticipate it differently, to speak about it differently, to lead our families differently, to enter into a day of delight And he says not doing your own ways That has to do with the direction the journey the normal your own ways by the way He uses the same word from the highway of holiness the way direct the trajectory the pathway you know the people you meet in the Sabbath that you know not your ways but God's ways a day like no other nor seeking your own pleasure nor finding your own pleasure not the things that you normally find pleasure in in the rest of the week Not that you should quit doing those during the week But you quit doing them during the Sabbath because there's a greater delight You thought that was your greatest delight.
It's not actually your greatest delight There's a greater delight and God gives you a day to sort of refashion your thinking about the things that you delight in so that you don't make them idols of delight and have to do them all the time because you're addicted to them And then there are these promises in verse 14. Then you shall delight yourself in the Lord. So if you do these things, if you call it a delight, and you turn away from your own pleasure, and you quit speaking your own words, in other words you speak the words of God to the people of God. You quit just blabbering about all your stuff and you speak of God and His goodness and His glory and everything that you say is couched in that. That doesn't mean that someone can't say, hey how are you doing?
And you say, oh well I did this and I did that. But it ought to be couched in the beauty and the glory and the delight of God. You shall delight yourself in the Lord and then he says and I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth and Feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father the mouth of the Lord Has spoken And so here God calls his people to the river of delights, that they would be so delighted in the Lord that they would see how the things that give them pleasure, well they're a certain kind of pleasure but they're nothing like the delight of God so that they can see the contrast in it. God's not impressed in you depriving yourself. He's much more concerned about delighting yourself.
And then he says that there are two things that will happen You'll be riding and you'll be nourished those two things I will cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth. Picture that. Here we, I mean we're here in this place on the high hills of the earth. It's so beautiful. You know, get up, it's like getting up on a mountain and seeing the beauty and the grandeur and the majesty of that landscape.
It's like being on top of the Himalayas and seeing the glory of God and delighting in it. I'll cause you to ride on the high hills of the earth. You know when you take your children into the Sabbath day, you ought to be taking them to ride. Help them to ride on the high hills of the earth delighting themselves in the Lord. And then He will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father.
He'll feed you. It means that He'll fulfill all the promises of Abraham, that you will be a healing salve in the nations, that all the families of the earth will be blessed. It'll be a celebration, an ordinance of justice and righteousness and goodness. And you will be a blessing like Abraham's seed is a blessing and how Abraham's seed was designed to bless all the families of the earth. And so God has given us a day of delight so that it would be a blessing in the world.
And I believe He commands us to keep it. If you have questions about it, go to the great confessions of faith. Go to the Westminster confession of faith. Go to the Baptist confession of 1689. Go to the great catechisms of the Christian faith and you'll find that the people of God celebrated the Sabbath like we're talking about here for many generations.
And it is true that we are designed by God to raise up the foundations of many generations. It actually has been a few generations that the Sabbath has been rejected and its foundations are gone. Would you rebuild those foundations in your heart, in your family, in your church, as ordinances of justice for the blessing of all the families of the earth. And then finally, let me close with this. This last phrase should not be ignored.
The mouth of the Lord has spoken. This is the settled authority of God. God makes everything to work according to the counsel of His will. He keeps all of His promises. He does everything the way that He has designed and described it.
And you will ride on the high hills of the earth. The mouth of the Lord is spoken. He will feed you with the heritage of Jacob. He will heed you. He will heal you.
He will guide you. He will make you like a water garden. These are the promises of God. And This is the delights in the highway of holiness. You know, where is the culture of your own heart and your own words and your own ways taking you?
Where does it take you? Here's a guarantee. If you love your own words and your own ways and your own pleasures, you can never ride on the high hills of the earth. It simply won't happen. The Sabbath is given to the church for many reasons.
I believe one reason, apart from all the blessings, is that he's given the Sabbath to the church to help the people in the church to know who they Really are to know whether they're sheep or goats to know whether they're going through the motions to know whether they actually delight in Jesus Christ they hunger for him They long for the songs and the prayers and they're not pointing their fingers at their brothers But they want God they want delight in God and in God alone and so as a result They call it a delight because God has saved them and he's given them strength to do so. So I pray for a great day of delight as we move through this day. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for Your matchless Word, its beauty, its graphic, illustrative power, its pictures that take us to the high hills of the earth. We thank You, Lord.
I pray you'd bless all of our families and all of these churches that are represented here that you would cause a revival of delight in the church. Amen.