Reward Sibanda
16 min read ⭑
“God says the answer for rest in your soul is to go back to the ancient paths. The ancient paths, I believe, are the ancient practices like prayer, fasting, Sabbath and meditation that have been the cornerstone of the faith of our founding fathers and everybody who has gone before us.”
Reward Sibanda is a deep thinker and a passionate teacher. As a speaker, writer, pastor at Saddleback Church and World Vision’s Senior Director of National Church Engagement, he regularly offers fresh perspectives and unique insights into timeless biblical principles. His new book, “How to Fast,” helps Christians young and old unlock the power of fasting with practical teaching and personal stories.
Join us today for a fascinating conversation about the pull Reward feels between his right-brained upbringing in Zimbabwe and his current right-brain cultural context in the U.S. (especially when it comes to time vs. relationships) — plus an insider’s look at the spiritual practices he engages in to draw closer to Jesus.
The following is a transcript of a live interview. Responses have been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.
QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT
The meals we enjoy are about so much more than the food we eat. So how does a “go-to” meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind your web bio?
I’m originally from Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, the country’s second capital. The history behind my people is that they were warriors and absolute carnivores. So my favorite meal? If it bled, it’s game. We raised a lot of cattle and are an agrarian society, in a sense. So now that I live in Orange County, California, I always crave something similar to my hometown’s barbecue. It was just straight-up beef roasted over the fire, and we call it Twala. There are a lot of different iterations of this meal, but you typically eat it with a basic, starchy corn base.
The beautiful thing about this type of food is the sensory experience. When you eat, there’s got to be a smell. In my particular context, we would go to the butcher, where they kill the animal, and if you go behind, that’s where they would sell that particular meal. So you eat around the fire. As I’m eating it, I can hear the fire, I can hear the conversation around, and I can smell the fresh meat being roasted on the fire. To me, the most important aspect of that is how grounding it is and how it was such a huge part of my cultural upbringing.
Warner Brothers
QUESTION #2: REVEAL
We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity do you love engaging in that also helps you find essential spiritual renewal?
A huge part of my faith convictions, my faith expression and my orthopraxy is grounded in my upbringing. I was one of 13 kids, and we were always surrounded by people, lots of happiness and lots of joy. A grounding activity for me was watching a Zimbabwean TV show every Saturday from 9 a.m. to noon. The channel would play old cartoons, and we would all gather around as kids and watch those. For some reason, I never got over watching quirky old cartoons. I loved the creativity behind them and the premise of the impossible. In the world of cartoons, gravity is redefined and you can essentially do anything.
Nowadays, the most grounding activity I do is watch old cartoons. For some reason, I see creativity. It sparks comedy. It reminds me of my cultural grounding and my growing up. At the end of it, I feel so rejuvenated because, for those 10 to 15 minutes, I’ve been immersed in a world where the impossible does not exist. So that is a non-spiritual activity that connects me to my upbringing and aspects of my past and is the most life-giving thing there is. It helps in our generation because there are very few clean and life-giving things we can get from secular sources. I’ve invested a holy amount of time into old-school “Tom and Jerry,” “Dexter’s Laboratory” and similar Cartoon Network shows.
QUESTION #3: CONFESS
Every superhero has a weakness; every human too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re all broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite and how do you confront its power head-on?
Robert Levine is a thought leader and a social anthropologist. He wrote this fascinating book that gave me a framework for somebody being equally shaped by true cultures, which are as different as you can get. So his concept is that there are left- and right-brain people — some very analytical, some very creative. There are also left-brain and right-brain communities. How they perceive time is very different, and it’s all based on value systems. In right-brain communities, for example — such as many Asian, Latin American or African countries and older, more established civilizations — human interaction is more important than timely interaction. So if I’m in a conversation with somebody, that is more important than me getting to my next appointment. I’ll prioritize their interaction over time-based commitments. In the West, though, which consists mainly of left-brain communities, people prioritize what they put on the calendar. That is my value system. So I will cut short a conversation to get to my next appointment.
With that said, my kryptonite is that I was formatively conditioned to be so socially gregarious and value people in conversation that I’m always late for everything. It can be tough to exist and do business in a Western context, where people say, “Hey, you said noon, so as soon as it’s 12:01, you’re cutting into my time.” My kryptonite, then, is when I engage in human interaction that I feel is deeply meaningful and serendipitous as though God were working through it, I tend to take as long as it needs. To be honest, because it’s such a deep-rooted and deep-seated value system, I still struggle with whether this is actually a bad thing or not. Plus, the Bible was contextualized in an ancient culture, which would be the equivalent of a right-brain culture. So I still wonder if what I do is bad, even though I fully understand when people say, “Well, you’re in the West now, and in the West, when you have a specific time commitment, you have to stick to it.”
I understand that argument, and I try at a fundamental, visceral level to adhere to it, but there’s still a cognitive, innate pushback in which I feel people and interactions should be organic and more important. So I would say I’m learning to handle my kryptonite by gathering people around me who might hurry me along or who can see when the interaction isn’t as beneficial as I think it is. I’m fundamentally dealing with which of those two is right. I’m coping with it, and I have surrounded myself with people who know how to hurry and shimmy me along to the next thing.
QUESTION #4: FIRE UP
Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?
For me, everything boils down to ontology. Everything reduces to its most common denominator. This is why all my convictions go down to Genesis 1:26, when God says, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness.” When God made us in his form, he gave us an assignment and then a context. The context is always very telling. When God gave us his kingdom — when he gave us religion and relationship — he wrapped and contextualized it in a specific, Middle Eastern culture. Therefore, we cannot divorce the sociology from the theology. When God created me and gave me my purpose, there was something about my sociology and my cultural and historical context that he felt would benefit the body of Christ.
So now what is the conflict? Researchers call us the anxious generation. If you look at social media, you’ll see we exist in a highly busy, highly stimulated, attention-economy world. Because of that, a lot of Christians have lost the lost art of rest. And rest is important because we were created in a redemptive context. We were created from rest, we lose rest, then in Christ, we find rest, and in him, we exist until we enter eternal rest once again. But in the middle, God has given us specific practices hidden in cultural wisdom on how we can obtain that rest.
That’s why my toil right now and the thing that I’m obsessed with is the different practices that God has given us for when our souls are weary. That’s why I wrote a book titled “How to Fast: Rediscover the Ancient Practice for Unlocking Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Renewal.” I started with the idea that where the ancient paths and the good way are, there you will find rest for your soul (see Jer. 6:16). What’s the soul? It is your mind, will and emotions — the things that become wearied and overstimulated by this generation. God says the answer for rest in your soul is to go back to the ancient paths. The ancient paths, I believe, are the ancient practices like prayer, fasting, Sabbath and meditation that have been the cornerstone of the faith of our founding fathers and everybody who has gone before us.
I’ve found that within the American context, people understand rest. Sabbath is making a resurgence. People have always understood prayer in this particular context, too. But fasting is less popular even though it’s essentially a recalibrating tool for the soul. When we look at the tripartite makeup of man — spirit, soul and body — we see that prayer is for the spirit, worship is for the body (and I go deeper into that in the book), but fasting is for humbling the soul. So if we are overstimulated, tired or anguished, we need a practice that speaks to and directly deals with the soul. From my cultural conditioning and family upbringing, I learned that you fast when you need to center yourself by focusing on the gravitas of God. We need clarity to hear God and shut down the voices of the soul, mind, will and emotions — much of which comes through your thoughts.
In my generation, we don’t typically fast as a way of pursuing rest. So that’s why I felt like the Lord had me go on the “The Rule of Life” podcast to talk about fasting and prayer with John Mark Comer. As I was sharing those concepts rooted in my sociology, somebody from WaterBrook was listening and later said to me, “Hey, we’ve been waiting for somebody to speak with conviction and depth on fasting, but a lot of people don’t want to write fasting books. Would you be interested in writing a book and seeing where it goes?” That’s where serendipitously, and by God’s provisional grace, my most meaningful toil and the aspect of my fascination — which is fasting — came from. The book just came out, and I’m blown away by all the beautiful testimonials that are coming from it.
QUESTION #5: BOOST
Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?
I think for me it’s spiritual practices. Think about air. The pressure and pace — everything is dictated by the parameters of the container. What I mean by that is whenever you make room for the Holy Spirit, he comes in and steals it. And when he comes, he has the spirit of rest. When he comes, he is the spirit of revelation. When he comes, there is the spirit of truth. I found that a lot of people are not invigorated by all the benefits and the beauty of the Holy Spirit, because we simply have not built the capacity for him to come and fill the rest of our lives.
For this reason, I’ve modeled my daily spiritual practices after the priesthood. (Remember, Jesus redeems us to be priests. It’s a mandate in Genesis and is also a reality in Revelation. There’s nowhere in the middle where that should be taken away — we’re created as kings and priests.) In the Old Testament, the priest would offer an offering in the morning, and they would offer an offering in the evening as an act of faith to be a statute for generations forever. I took that as a model of my devotion to God, so I’ve restructured my life so that I wake up very early, quiet my spirit and meditate before I pray. And then in that place of prayer, I’ve found that I hear the guidance of the Holy Spirit. In Exodus 29:42-45, God promises the children of Israel that as they come and meet with him, they’ll be sanctified by his presence. He promised to come and meet with them and speak with them. So what I do is build communion spaces in the morning, saying, “Holy Spirit, fill me.” I hold everything that’s happening that day before him, and I intentionally invite his wisdom. I invite his presence and his grace. Sometimes I share what I’m anxious about for the upcoming day. Sometimes I share things I’m grateful for. But since I wake up so early, I know I can spend two or three hours there — there’s no rush and no pressure.
Then in the evening, I once again posture myself in that particular place. By God’s grace, I have a prayer space. It’s a room where my wife and I pray, a space we’ve sanctified and dedicated for prayer. David says, “[I] declare your steadfast love in the morning, and your faithfulness by night” (Ps. 92:2, ESV). So I’ve created those two bookends for my day. In that particular space, I find communion with the Holy Spirit, and it balances everything out. Then when I go to sleep, I’m entering an extended period of rest where the Holy Spirit speaks to me through the night. Another thing that we do is play the audio Bible as we go to sleep. So many times, I’ll think of Scriptures but have no reference, and I know it was instilled in me. Whenever I wake up for that hour of meditation, I’ll find that my spirit is alive and it’s being fed.
QUESTION #6: inspire
Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you in this season?
I’ve found that prayer, fasting and meditation help me center, recalibrate and ground myself. But the Word, like actually reading the Word, is the most valuable operation I do. As a pastor, I traffic in inspiration, and the Word is the sword of the Spirit. So if I spend time meditating and grounding myself in him, all of a sudden, a Scripture will pop up in my spirit, and I’ll use that.
There are two particular books of the Bible I love to meditate on as I fall asleep. Paul says, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly” (Col. 3:16, ESV), so I love to play Psalms and Proverbs since those speak to the nature and the goodness of God. The Bible says we enter God’s gates with thanksgiving (see Ps. 100:4), and gratitude is the ethos of how we come together, so there’s nothing left for us to do than to praise him and thank him. And from that position of gratitude, we go and we live out the fullness of his call in and over our lives. So I’ll either play Psalms and Proverbs over and over because I want that anchor in my spirit.
I also listen to Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians and Colossians because I feel like those ground me in my identity. I do this because Ephesians 6, which talks about the full armor of God, says the sword of the Spirit is the Word of God (see verse 17). Think about that like a blade — you either use it for offense or defense. I’ve seen the Holy Spirit use the Word as a scalpel to scrap out things of me that need to go. But I’ve also seen him put Scriptures in my hand and use them as a weapon against the thoughts other people may be having too.
So many times, the Word in me can apply to another person’s life. For example, I could be walking around and somebody says, “I’m kind of depressed,” and immediately, because I read the Scriptures, I know the joy of the Lord is their strength. And the moment I say that, I feel the sword of the Spirit cutting through the lies, and I can see it resonate in that particular person. That’s why I try as much as I can to dwell on Scripture — I never know what verse God is going to use to encourage other people or even to encourage me.
It works the same way when I’m tempted. I don’t even have to try to think of the Scripture. If it’s in me, it’ll bubble up in me. Those are the ways I have found Scripture internally and externally to be a scalpel and a sword.
QUESTION #7: FOCUS
Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed reality and your heart?
Growing up in Zimbabwe as child number 11 of 13 in a country with the worst inflation in the world, books were my escape. I still remember that visceral, decontextualizing feeling from poverty, from my reality, from everything. When I read “The Chronicles of Narnia” for the first time, it made me feel like I was in a different world, and throughout the rest of that entire book, I could see the story as if watching it on TV. So the Lord has always used books, and especially concepts, to shift my perspective and framework.
Often, the experiences I go through feel disconnected and random, but then, maybe at the end of the day, I’ll have a conversation, and suddenly, it ties everything together. I’ll realize why this or that happened. So it’s always been books, and I’ll share three books in particular that have completely changed my perspective on everything and helped me understand my life experiences.
The first is by E.M. Bounds, who is the Yoda of prayer. I mean, he is a straight-up Jedi, and he helped shape my orthopraxy around prayer. If you read contemporary readings and interpretations of the ancient practices, they’re often used soothingly as a balm to our weary souls. If we’re not careful, we can devolve into a consumerist perspective of prayer. After coming to the U.S., I almost got to that place, but E.M. Bounds helped me see prayer as an offensive tool for advancing the kingdom of God. It’s effectual, fervent prayer — praying for the impossible and praying for God to move in the hearts and in the lives of people. Intercession is at the heart of that kind of prayer. When you knock on heaven’s doors on behalf of people who don’t do it for themselves. So reading E.M. Bounds’ books on prayer gave me a very balanced perspective. There’s prayer to replenish ourselves, like when Jesus would step away and pray and fill himself, and then there are also public prayers, like when Jesus prayed on behalf of other people.
The second book was a cerebral delight. I think Andy Crouch is one of the foremost thought leaders in our generation. He has a book called “Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power.” In it, he unapologetically and unabashedly deconstructs power, which I believe is one of the most incendiary conversations we can have nowadays. He makes such a classic case about how we can redeem power and use it for good.
The last book is by a man named Gene Edwards called “A Tale of Three Kings.” Often, when the Lord blesses our lives, there’s a residue of pride or an element of an inflated sense of self that gradually begins to latch onto us like sediment. The book asks the question, “Which of the three kings are you like?”
From the moment I read those three books, they improved my walk with God. Also, when it comes to podcasts, I thank God for people like John Mark Comer. He has helped point our generation back to the things that ground our orthopraxy.
We all have things we cling to to survive or even thrive in our fast-paced, techno-driven world. How have you been successful in harnessing technology to aid in your spiritual growth?
My answer to this question is everything that you guys do at Rapt. If you think about it, technology is scaffolding. It’s an extension of everything we are so we can do more. Aggregating the tools and resources people need to grow in their faith is the most worthwhile kingdom initiative — and that’s what Rapt does.
You can come and find articles and other resources to help you in your journey with the Lord. If you don’t use Rapt, find other kingdom aggregate platforms. Find other one-stop information spaces. And make sure those platforms also foster community, which is another thing I love about Rapt. It’s not just a platform for resources, but it fosters an intentional sense of community. For example, Rapt might highlight five people on a similar journey to yours so you can find all the resources you need to help you along in your journey. The whole ethos is: Let’s follow him together. And the team at Rapt makes it their life’s work to make that accessible to as many people as possible. So my one-word answer is Rapt.
QUESTION #8: dream
God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?
The book I just wrote, “How to Fast,” had stirred something new within me. I threw it out to a generation to help anyone it could. The feedback I received revealed that our generation has not been discipled in the day-to-day discipleship of walking with the Lord. People are asking things like “When you say I should pray, what do I say? How do I pray? Where do I start?” This isn’t just the younger generation; there are older people who have recently come to the faith who don’t know how to grow in the Lord practically.
There’s an oversaturation of voices and lost faith. It’s a cognitive marketplace, a noisy place. And what people desire is to find the true-north voices that resound with integrity, are grounded in practice and provide rudimentary pathways. When I first started writing my book, I considered calling it “The Art of Fasting.” But my publisher came back and I said, “I don’t think that’s what people are looking for or what people need. If you genuinely want this to be a helpful tool, call it ‘How to Fast’ and lean very heavily on what the practice looks like.”
So when the book came out, people responded by asking very practical questions. They never asked about the philosophy — always about the practice. “How do I fast? What about coffee? How do I pray? How do I become consistent in my prayer life? How do I read the Word?” So now, I want to start a ministry platform that offers practical teaching on three specific things: how to pray, how to fast and how to be radically generous. I don’t know if it’s God’s genius or it’s just coincidence, but the three emphases of Lent are radical generosity, prayer and fasting. Those things were so fundamental to my spiritual formation that I knew if our generation can master them, it would take our faith to the next level. So what I’m excited about is this mission that teaches people how to pray, how to fast, how to be radically generous and how to do that in community.
I love that Reward has been receiving so many practical questions about walking with God. Truth be told, this isn’t unique to our generation. In fact, Jesus’ own disciples said to him one day, “Lord, teach us to pray” (see Luke 11:1). And he did. Instead of launching into the philosophical reasons to pray, the motivations we should have or the results to expect (as he had done at other times), he gave them a simple outline to follow:
“And he said to them, ‘When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation”’” (Luke 11:2-4, ESV).
Pause and reflect: what spiritual practices do you struggle to walk out? Where do you need practical instruction? Then, ask God to direct you to people and resources that can help you take the next step forward.
Reward Sibanda is a dynamic speaker, writer, pastor at Saddleback Church and the Senior Director of National Church Engagement at World Vision, the world’s largest Christian humanitarian organization. Renowned for his unique perspective and transformative insights that challenge conventional thinking, Reward thrives on empowering and challenging people from all walks of life to transcend limitations and pursue God’s best for them. His ministry inspires many, and his book, How to Fast, offers a powerful guide to rejuvenation. Reward resides in California with his wife, Pam, and son, Silo.
