Huge Hope: Major Power in the Minor ProphetsSample

Sometimes we try too hard to get back into God’s good graces.

This is a figure of speech, of course. We are never outside God’s grace, but sometimes it feels as though we haven’t quite lived our lives up to par, that we’re falling short of God’s standards for us. And so we overreact and go all out and really try to DO something to earn God’s love again.

But as we’ll read today in the prophet Micah, a lot of times our DOING is the wrong kind of action we should be taking.

“With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high?” the prophet writes in verse 6. “Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”

These are all very typical sacrifices, escalating in the amount of sacrifice they require. But they’re not the kind of sacrifice God’s looking for. Let’s look at verse 8.

“He has told you, O mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”

From what we read today, God is much more interested in the ways we go through His world than He is in what material things we can give Him.

Admittedly, it would be so much easier to just have a checklist of things that please God. Just sacrifice this amount of rams, bring this amount of oil, offer this number of your children. It would hurt, but we would KNOW that we’re doing the “right thing.”

Instead, God calls us to a gentler way of doing. A way that requires us to learn His character, His way of being, so that we can bring it into our everyday world. How can we “do justice” if we don’t know what God’s justice looks like? How can we love kindness if we haven’t spent time with God to understand the ways He exhibits kindness? How can we “walk humbly” if we’re too proud to take those first steps with Him?

Striving isn’t always the answer. Sometimes we have to stop trying to DO and just BE with God instead. Then let that BEING overflow into the rest of our lives.