December 15, 2025
Isaiah 58
Below is my contribution to our church’s 2025 Advent devotional, written for today, December 15, on today’s Old Testament reading.
Sunday after church, and all my kids want is a screen. “No screens on Sundays” doesn’t compute as a way to rest—what is rest but zoning out, no one bugging you? One’s hogging the couch where another wants to sit, and Sabbath means orange juice at all three meals and skipping piano practice—not a reason to refrain from pushing onto the coveted couch spot. “What?” my child says, at the suggestion that TV and jockeying for couch position aren’t ideal Sabbath activities. “It’s resting. It’s Sabbath, after all.”
At their best, my children model a beautiful embrace of Sabbath as a gift. But young as they are, Sabbath celebration remains primarily about them. What they don’t understand may be a struggle we comparably mature adults share: The gift of Sabbath is not a day to do as we please.
Isaiah 58 offers comfort and hope for those on the receiving end of exploitation, the poor wanderer, the oppressed—and confront those who use Sabbath, or any religious act, for their own ends. As we reflect on the challenges of Isaiah 58:1-7, we can probably identify modern parallels, which we rightly resist and lament. But it is tantalizingly easy to apply the scathing corrections to those other Christians, while neglecting how we need to hear them: How do we leverage religious rituals as a covert attempt to manipulate God? Dress up self-focus with godly words? Mask our devaluing of those God loves behind religious hustle and bustle? If this resonates, consider staying here, meditating where God is drawing you.
Where I want to land, though, is not specific actions that exemplify making Sabbath a day to do as we please, but the heart behind that tendency. Whether working or resting, I think the underlying fear is that our needs won’t be met, tempting us to seek to meet them ourselves. We can do this by working feverishly, rejecting the Sabbath invitation to interrupt our frenzy and rest. We can do this by anxiously grabbing self-focused ‘rest.’ Like my kids’ squabbles over couch position, I see this tendency in my own desire to use Sabbath to ignore my kids and nap. The nap need is real, but my urge to meet it by grabbing for myself at the expense of those around me is rooted in anxious fear that God is not enough. Whether I dishonor Sabbath by skipping it or using it selfishly, what I’m really refusing is the gift of God’s abundant provision while insisting I be my own provider.
True Sabbath is trusting in God to meet our needs, trusting so fully that we do not resort to making our own way (at others’ expense), whether in work or in rest. Trusting in action by choosing the freedom to spend ourselves, as part of God’s provision for others (v. 10). Finding that when we do, we are not depleted, but refilled—because our own needs are satisfied by God (v. 11); we may traverse a sun-scorched land, but will be like a well-watered garden.
