What does God actually want from people of faith? In this message, we look at two passages that offer an answer many of us don’t expect. In Isaiah 58, God’s people ask why their fasting and humility have gone unnoticed. God replies that it is the people who have failed to see, because they turned away from their hungry, homeless, and oppressed neighbors.
In Matthew 25, Jesus describes a great separation, and it begins the way people expected. But the dividing line is not personal faith, religious background, or family lineage. It comes down to one question: how did you treat the least among us? Both passages, centuries apart, say the same thing, and both ask us to look again at where we expect to find God.
Where we choose to look for God matters. If we look only in cathedrals or only on the pages of our Bibles, God can start to feel small or distant. When we choose to see God among the hungry, the thirsty, and the overlooked, we find the God of the incarnation, who chose to be present in the hardest places of the world.
