Paradoxes boil over the lip of the pot and stream across the counter when Christianity gets cooking. Take fasting, for example. One would expect that when you do it, you thin out and have less energy. But Isaiah says that when you fast “to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free,” the result is that you get “fat bones” (Isaiah 58:6, 11). Also, when you fast to “bring the poor that are cast out to your house,” that is the very time when you “build the old waste places” and “raise up the foundations of many generations” (Isaiah 58:7, 12). Strange, I didn’t think the poor had the money to fund that building project.

We are building the walls of the New Jerusalem, and as we do, we need more than the calorie-counting app. We need more than calculus and trigonometry. Keep in mind just how strange this is. Saul decreed that none of his men eat until his enemies were scattered. That forced fast was foolish and unbelieving, and the natural result was weak men and mediocre results. But Isaiah’s fast bubbles over by grace. When the Spirit proclaims the fast in you, fasting men grow heavy on the scales. Men who have less in their bellies somehow have the energy to be called “the repairers of the breach, the restorers of paths to dwell in” (Isaiah 58:12).