When You Fast ElianaZechariah 7:5August 27, 2026

Did You Do It Unto Me

This message is for having fasted at every church she has ever belonged to and never once been asked, or asked herself, who it was actually for

Four churches. She counted them up on the drive home and it came to four.

The one she was raised in, where they did it in the spring, and she was eleven the first time and mostly worried about doing it wrong. The one after she married, which did it in January and made a chart. The one in the town they moved to for his work, which called it something with a word like journey in it. And this one, which she has been in for sixteen years and which is the kindest of the four and does it quietly and does not make a chart.

She has done every single one. She has never missed one. She would not know how to be a person who missed one.

And it occurred to her, at the light on the corner by the school, that in forty-eight years of doing this, nobody has ever once asked her who she was doing it for. Not a pastor. Not a friend. Not her mother, who taught her. Not her husband, who is a good man and would have asked if it had crossed his mind.

And she has never asked herself. Which is the part that sat in the car with her after she had turned the engine off.

If you have got a count like that behind you, come and sit down on the porch. Nobody is going to make you defend the forty-eight years.

God asked that exact question once, and He asked it out loud

I want to show you something that reads harsh at first glance and is one of the tenderest questions in the Old Testament once you see where it comes from.

The people in Zechariah's day had been keeping a set of fasts for a very long time. Generations. They came to ask a technical question about whether they should keep going, now that things had changed. And God answered the technical question with a question that was not technical at all.

Speak unto all the people of the land, and to the priests, saying, When ye fasted and mourned, did ye at all fast unto me, even to me?Zechariah 7:5

Even to me. He says it twice in one breath, which is what a person does when the thing they are saying matters more than the sentence can hold.

Now hear what that question actually is. It is not an accusation. He is not saying they were frauds. He is saying: all those years, there was a Person on the other end of this, and I want you to know that I was there, and I want to know whether you knew.

Nobody had asked them either. That is the thing. Whole generations of doing it, and the question had never once been put to them, until God put it Himself.

You are being asked by the only One with a right to ask, and He is asking because He was there for all of it. That is not my softening of a hard verse, it is what the doubled phrase in Zechariah 7:5 is doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a question like that arrive as kindness rather than as a bill.

Being asked is not the same as being caught

Here is where a woman with forty-eight years behind her can go wrong in about four seconds, so let us go slowly.

Being asked who it was for does not mean it was for nothing. It does not mean the forty-eight years were wasted, or performed, or self-serving. Most of them were obedience, plain and unglamorous, done by a girl of eleven and then a young wife and then a woman in a town she had not chosen, because it was what her people did and she belonged to her people.

God is not sorting through your decades looking for the fraudulent ones. He asked the question because the answer is the good part. He wanted them to know there was somebody at the other end.

That is what most people never get told about any of this. They are told when it starts. They are handed a chart. Nobody ever mentions that there is a Person waiting in it, and so they do a real and honest thing for decades in a room they think is empty.

You have not been talking into an empty room, and you were heard in every one of those four churches. Psalm 34:15 puts it plainly, that His ears are open, and the same Spirit who kept that true when she was eleven and worried about doing it wrong has not gone anywhere since.

The part that outranks all the rest of it

Before we go on, the thing that outranks everything on this page.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not certain, speak to your doctor first and let their answer be the answer. There is no length here, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there never will be one. Nothing on this page needs your body to do anything.

And the quietness of it is about who is watching, never about hiding. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your husband is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is only good manners. None of that fails anything.

You have never been held at a distance by anything your body cannot do, and you never were. 2 Corinthians 8:12 settles that, where God receives according to what a person has and not according to what they do not, and the Holy Spirit has never been rationed by a doctor's advice.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.

A picture, not an account

Picture a woman who wrote a letter every week for thirty years to an address she had been given as a girl.

She wrote about the garden and the weather and the children and later the grandchildren. She never got a reply, and she stopped expecting one somewhere in the first year, and she kept writing, because the writing had become the shape of her week and she was not a woman who stopped things.

And one spring a young man came up the path, and he had a box under his arm, and he said: my grandfather died in March, and he left me this, and he told me to bring it to you myself.

Every letter. In order. Read, and read again, some of them so often the folds had gone soft.

She sat down on the step. She said, out loud, to nobody: I did not know anybody was there.

That is a picture, not an account. It is not a promise about your week or a claim about anybody's life. It is here because somebody needs to see what it looks like to find out that the room was never empty.

You are the one whose letters were kept, and you were being read the whole time you assumed you were not. Malachi 3:16 is where that sits, in a book of remembrance written for people who thought their quiet faithfulness had gone unrecorded, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old woman able to believe it on a step.

The breakthrough

So here is the turn, and it does not need you to go without anything at all.

You have been in a relationship for forty-eight years, and you are only now being told the other party's name. Scripture settled that in the doubled phrase, unto me, even to me (Zechariah 7:5), and His Spirit is not asking you to be sorry about the decades. He is telling you who was in them.

You do not have to go back and repair the four churches. They are not damaged. The chart in January was not a sin. What changes is Tuesday, and next spring, and the next time somebody hands you a start date without a reason: you will know who is at the other end of it, and knowing that is the whole of what was missing.

Declare this over yourself

Say these out loud, in your own voice, wherever you are sitting. The standing to speak like this is yours in Christ and it does not depend on how good your answer to His question is. Scripture is the ground under it and the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely willing, and what He does with the rest of your years, and how, is His, however He answers.

Question nobody ever put to me, you are kind and you are not an accusation. God asked it Himself in Zechariah, and He asked because He had been at the other end of all of it. In the name of Jesus I am answering out loud instead of going quiet.
Shame about forty-eight years, you are not God's verdict and you are not traveling on with me. He never called those years fraudulent, and His ears were open through every one of them, and His Spirit is settling that in me on this step. Obedience in an empty-seeming room is still obedience.
Father, You were there in four churches and I did not know Your name was on it. I thank You that You asked me Yourself rather than leaving me to keep going without knowing. This one is for You, and that is my whole answer, and I am telling nobody else.

Why we ask you to say these out loud