In Scott Brown's sermon on Isaiah 58, he explores the theme of genuine delight in the Lord versus misplaced delight, emphasizing that true religious practices must be rooted in love and justice. Isaiah 58 critiques the Israelites for their hollow rituals, such as fasting without genuine repentance or compassion. Brown highlights that God desires His people to engage in acts of love and mercy, such as freeing the oppressed and feeding the hungry, rather than empty rituals that serve self-interest. The sermon contrasts two types of people: those who perform religious duties without true delight and those who find joy in the Lord, aligning their actions with God's desires. The message underscores the importance of confronting sin and embracing a sincere relationship with God, characterized by selfless love and a commitment to justice.

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 seen? 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 labors. Indeed, you fast for strife and debate and to strive 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 boorish to spread out sour cloth and ashes? Would you call this a fast and an acceptable day to the Lord? Is this not the fast that I've 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 rear guard. 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, 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 noonday. 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 fell. 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 foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holiday, 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, 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, Ours 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.

Let me take our seats. In this In this remarkable chapter that is filled with such beautiful imagery, you have these people who are slumped over, they're so somber, they're beating themselves, and it ends with 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. You know, 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.

A 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, it's 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. 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 up with, tell my people their transgression in verse one. 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 100 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 he's 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 is how 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 1 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 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 in 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 the the Hebrew shofar horn that was allowed to be heard for long distances. He's really calling for the crying out like the watchman.

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 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.

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 by calling out the sins of the people that exist. So I pray that we're 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 going to 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 it's they're professing that they have a delight in approaching God But the key to understanding verse two 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 engaging their religious life. And 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 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 do they 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 his 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, I mean it's a word to tread. They delight in the intellectual ways of God.

They're kind of like theology walks. They just like the stuff and the discussions that occur as a role. So on paper, they desire that God would regulate their worship, but 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 proud boasting about their appearances. 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 any kind of delight or change or fruit bearing or anything like that. They're saying, well, 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? You know, 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 they're like children who always went to church their whole life. And they don't see their deadness. 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 a word, delight, in order to smoke out the dead. But they're not clear, really, seemingly, that they're putting on an outward show.

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.

One of the men in our church said, It's like they're just trying to have the dirtiest sackcloth, to have the bloodiest back they could get, just to prove how righteous they were and make sure everybody knows it. But They're also 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 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 six, 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 it 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 with charitable giving because they want glory from him. And then Jesus turns and 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 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, 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 bulrush 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 in other words this is the fast that I like this is the fast that I like. This is the fast that I want my people to be involved in. 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 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