Isaiah 58 is one of the most misunderstood passages in the bible. In a classic case of failing to grapple with the context, the last section is virtually always misread:

“If you turn back your foot from the Sabbath, from doing your pleasure on my holy day, and call the Sabbath a delight and the holy day of the Lord honorable; if you honor it, not going your own ways, or seeking your own pleasure, or talking idly [NASB: 'speaking your own word']; then you shall take delight in the Lord, and I will make you ride on the heights of the earth; I will feed you with the heritage of Jacob your father, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

Most folk, especially conservative folk, read "doing your pleasure" etc as a reference to 'things we find enjoyable'. In the back of our minds we often think but can I really go swimming (or feast, or sleep, or read, or watch a movie etc), taking my own pleasure, on the Lord's Day?

But this reading has lost its anchor. The entire passage is taken up with God's rebuke of his people because they will not do what he wants them to. (see matt's excellent summary.) The call of God to do justice to the needy, the poor, the oppressed - it is all being ignored. God's summons to a relief-giving, ministerial lifestyle among his people is being trampled underfoot while they continue to 'worship' correctly. But God hates that worship; it is false in the most horrible way. It proclaims in public what is manifestly untrue everywhere else: that the people love God and their neighbour. The truth is that the people have an idol in their hearts: their own advancement, their own comforts, their own riches, and they love neither God nor their neighbour.

And thus we come to Isaiah's final call and promise: if God's people will do HIS pleasure, will speak HIS words of relief and love, will return to faithfulness and justice because of the Sabbath, then God will open the floodgates of heaven's blessings for them.

Before Isaiah's challenge I come up short. Not because I have watched a movie on Sunday, or bought some item of food, or gone swimming, or failed to attend the second worship service, or simply spent the day among friends. It is because I have so often not done what worship MEANS. In fact, I have spent most of my Christian life ignoring it. So - have I and my people really turned our foot from our own pleasure because of the Sabbath, and done the Lord's? For a couple of hours each Sunday we have worshipped God with the right rituals; perhaps we even say grace before meals. But are our tables and communion closed to any but ourselves? (see Jesus' comments in Matt 5:46-47: "If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?") Would anyone around us (let's say the immediate environment of our church building) know the God we worship? That is, do they know relief from loneliness, poverty, oppression, ill-health, despair, or social exclusion? Are we effectively irrelevant to their troubles? If so, God isn't impressed with our rivers of oil and ten thousand rams. He calls us to forsake our own pleasures.

THAT is the challenge of Isaiah 58.