Skip to main content

Get my Prayer & Fasting email

If you want to get my daily Prayer & Fasting Email for the next 22 days, send your email to [email protected]. Here is today’s: Good morning fasters and prayer warriors! I’m on my ninth day of this juice fast. Last night before bed, Karen made me a yummy mixed fruit ju…
By Seth Barnes

If you want to get my daily Prayer & Fasting Email for the next 22 days, send your email to [email protected]. Here is today’s:

Good morning fasters and prayer warriors!

I’m on my ninth day of this
juice fast. Last night before bed, Karen
made me a yummy mixed fruit juice with mineral water. With delicious fare like that, you hardly
notice the absence of food. I’m
discovering that my fears of constant hunger pangs were overblown. I feel like I’m a kid standing in the
freezing water yelling to his friends standing on the pool’s edge, “C’mon in,
the water isn’t cold at all!” But
seriously, if you’ve not committed to the food fast yet, it’s not too late to
start. The spiritual focus that comes
with the fast more than offsets the struggle over not eating. As we draw near to God, doing what He asks,
He draws near to us.

I’m enjoying the
communication with many of you. Charles
Kaye writes: “This notion of entering
into a deeper relationship with the Lord is one of the most “missed”
experiences. I hear pastors talk about it, I hear Christian friends
mention it. But if you scratch the surface, in general you find these are
just words. What they really want are the benefits without the
work. God waited for a year’s worth of prayers from me asking, “What
does it mean to obey?” before he spoke. He wanted me to thirst after
Him.He is waiting for our hearts to cry….”

So, at last we get to dive into Isaiah 58! What a treat is in store for us. This is my life passage. We’ll take it verse by verse.

Isaiah 58:1
“Shout it aloud, do not hold back. Raise
your voice like a trumpet. Declare to my
people their rebellion and to the house of Jacob their sins.”

Sharing a word
from the Lord

If you’ve ever felt God asking you to say something
to someone else, something so challenging that you felt awkward sharing it,
perhaps your heart began to beat and you felt a lump in your throat. It wasn’t so much the message you had to
deliver, perhaps, but the question as to how in the world you were supposed to
deliver it. Why couldn’t God just tell
you to sit the person down and share it over a drink or to write them a
letter? Just a little stage management
would go a long way.

Isaiah didn’t have that problem. As God’s mouthpiece to the nation of Israel,
he not only received the word of the Lord, he also had God’s coaching. As we join the two of them in
mid-conversation in Isaiah 58, the Lord has something to say and He’s about to
share not only what that is, but how He wants it said.

How a message is communicated is a part of the
message. So, if hypocrisy exists, God
wants to reveal it with the same attitude with which Jesus took on the
Pharisees. He wants to get their
attention and stop them in their tracks.
God will not let Isaiah equivocate.
So God tells Isaiah how His word should be communicated, much as a
director might speak to an actor:
“Isaiah, speak boldly, with a shout, like a trumpet!”

When you think about it, how else would you share a
message from God? Shouldn’t a clear
message from God to a group of people be delivered boldly, with authority? Before the presidential election in 2000, a
pastor named Dutch Sheets felt that God had told him that the election would be
a pivotal one for our country and that the Church needed to pray hard for
it. He shared that word with everyone he
knew. And whatever your political
persuasion may be, there is no denying that it was the most tightly contested
election in history. The direction of
the country was dramatically different as a result. The point is that Sheets had what he felt was
a message from God and he boldly shared it.

Tomorrow, more delving into the riches of this first
verse.

God bless you as you go through your day,

seth

Comments (3)

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *