The Fast, The Feast, And Jesus
Are you busy today? I know it’s a silly question on Thanksgiving. You are probably either getting ready to visit relatives for dinner or getting ready to open your door to them. If your day is anything like mine, you have a million things on your mind and several pots on the fire. It’s always been this way for me, even though I don’t want it to be. I usually feel bad after everyone leaves my house and I finally sit down and review the day’s events. The reason I feel bad is because I usually don’t see much “thanking” on Thanksgiving. I see a lot of food, a lot of eating; and a lot of taking in the blessings without giving out much thanks. I have five boys and over the years I have learned that eating comes pretty natural to them, but the gratefulness, not so much. We’ve always had to work hard on that. I have to think of ways to purposefully bring the thankfulness to the table with the turkey.
I know I’m not the only one struggling with this, when we all get bombarded with turkey dinner commercials, newspaper grocery ads, emails from restaurants beckoning us to come eat with them on Thanksgiving, and beautiful pictures of decorated tables on Pinterest! We start thinking about pie! We start writing down our shopping list instead of cataloging our blessings. But a few days ago something hit me as I read my Bible. I was reading about fasting, and I wondered how we can truly be thankful for our daily bread when we have not gone hungry; when we live in abundance compared to the rest of the world. Can we truly be thankful for the feast without the fast coming first? Until we have known the feeling of being empty, how can we truly acknowledge the blessing of being filled? The Fast should come before the feast, don’t you think?
Maybe that is why fasting and prayer went hand in hand throughout the Bible. God’s people new when they needed their prayers to mean business, they had to fast. It was a way of putting everything else aside and focusing on the One receiving their prayers. It was never meant to be for show, or a ritual performed to look holy, but to be holly His – body, mind, and spirit. Because they were human beings, they often got it wrong, just like me and my family can get Thanksgiving wrong by focusing on the food instead of the One who provided it. We can also forget about those who have less than us. We can forget about the hungry and oppressed because we forget what hunger and oppression feel like. Jesus said when we think of them and do things for them, we are doing it for Him. Isaiah wrote something similar when he penned these words from the heart of God.
He said this is the kind of fast God desires –
“Is this not the fast that I have chosen:
To loose the bonds 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?”
Isaiah 58:6-7
We don’t have to toss the turkey out today in order to live out the fast God has chosen for us. His fast begins within the heart and moves the body to action. It would probably do us some good to fast and go hungry once in a while, and be able to empathize with the poor. We can put Jesus at the center of Thanksgiving by remembering the least of these and being thankful for all He has given us.
The fast should always come before the feast, don’t you think?
Powerful message, Charlotte. We too often forget what it means to be hungry because of our plenty. May I remember that, daily.