Greetings Lenten Devotional Readers!
As you embark on this journey, you are encouraged to make yourself as open and available to God's word as possible. To this end, please take time to immerse yourself in the entire chapter from which the focal text is drawn each day. REMEMBER, the word of God is meant to be both heard and heeded. For this cause, we invite you to repeatedly listen to, read, recite, and meditate on this week's text, Isaiah 58, in its entirety, that you might commit it to your head and heart.
Answering the Call for Fasting? (Part 1)
Each year during the Lenten season, many people engage in fasting. We make ready our pantries and refrigerators; eliminating every temptation that might cause us to “fall off the wagon”. We indulge till our hearts are content on “Fat Tuesday”, because we know that over the next six to seven weeks, we will not have the pleasure of meat, sweet treats, or whatever foods we tend to forgo during this time. Yet, with all our planning around food, we, like God’s people of old, can still miss the mark… can miss the true significance of moments such as these.
God tells Isaiah to cry aloud to the people and tell them, “You have really got things twisted! You question why it is that I am blind to all you are doing, when it is clear that you are blind to all I require and desire of you.”
Let Us pause and take inventory, not of our pantries and refrigerators, but of our heads and our hearts. Let Us each ask ourselves, “What does God require of me… desire of me in this season?” Then, Let Us pray and regroup with the goals of hearing God and heeding God’s will, both now and throughout our Lenten journey.”