Sermonizing - Part I

Micah 6:6-8 is the passage that we will be mostly looking at this morning. I will be reading out of the English Standard Version translation of the Bible. The book of Micah is small, only 7 chapters, and is tucked in between Jonah and Nahum at the back of your Old Testament. Micah wrote this book to the nation of Judah, the southern kingdom, right about when Israel, the northern kingdom, was being carried off into captivity. Other prophets writing at that time were Amos and Isaiah, and all three of these prophets identified one of the problems with God’s people. They had fallen into idolatry, and had been there pretty much ever since the time of Solomon. This is an issue that is addressed in all of these books. However, it is not the only problem seen here, and it is not the problem that we will be looking at.

If you have your Bibles, keep your finger in Micah, but right now we’re going to flip back to Isaiah 1:11-15. The prophet Isaiah writes:

"What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD; I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of well-fed beasts; I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats. "When you come to appear before me, who has required of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations-- I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hates; they have become a burden to me; I am weary of bearing them. When you spread out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood.

Amos wrote a similar indictment in Amos 5:21-23, I’ll give you a moment to turn there. Amos says:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the peace offerings of your fattened animals,
I will not look upon them.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
to the melody of your harps I will not listen.

And our last passage with this theme, the one that we are going to be looking at is indeed Micah 6:6-7:


“With what shall I come before the LORD,

and bow myself before God on high?

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?”

What are these things that the prophets are vilifying? Surely they are some form of evil and pagan practice that they picked up from their evil and pagan neighbours. Right? No. The new moons and the Sabbaths, the incense and burnt offerings, even the nebulous solemn ceremonies, they are all part of the way that God had instructed Israel to honour Him. In the books of history God gave very clear and precise instructions on how the Israelites were to worship Him, to confess sins, to raise petitions or even to thank Him. And these ceremonies were all attendant to that process. But they were using these things as a check list to please God, like the Pharisees that Jesus condemns in Matthew 23:23-36. So in our modern context, we don’t generally worship with burnt offerings or incense. In fact, our worship looks very different from the worship of Micah’s day. However, the principle of the matter stays the same, so if He doesn’t want burnt offerings, does He really want your tithe? If He doesn’t want thousands of rams, does He really want you going on a short-term missions trip? If He doesn’t want ten thousand rivers of oil, does He really want you showing up to church for morning worship on Sunday? If these prophets stopped at this point, that might be what we would be inclined to believe. What is true is that your tithe, a missions trip or Sunday worship don’t mean anything without what immediately follows this indictment of the state of worship.

And here we get to the point of the message. The prophets have shown that these things are meaningless when they are simply exercises in following the rules. As Samuel said when responding to Saul’s rebellion against God’s command in 1 Samuel 15:22: “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to listen than the fat of rams.”

So listen up, because each of these prophets continues his discourse with a proclamation of what God is looking for. Isaiah continues in his passage by writing: “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause.” Amos declares that instead, “let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. Finally, Micah says: “He has told you, O man, 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?” I could stop right there and leave it at that, but Pastor Will told me to take a full hour, and I don’t think I’ve reached that yet. Isaiah and Amos both have plenty to say about what a follower of Yahweh is to do in place of these emptied rituals and rites, but we’re going to focus on what Micah writes.

Before Micah reaches the “what”, he asks “what does the Lord require of you but?” Micah is putting forward a challenge to the recipients of his message to see if they can find any other requirements. At the same time, it is also a rhetorical question since they are not going to be able to find anything else. The three items that follow are what the Lord requires of you. Please note that this is not in a salvation sense, but is rather written to the people of God at the time. Then, the people of God were the Jews. Now, the people of God are those who “confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in their hearts that God raised Him from the dead”, as the apostle Paul wrote in Romans 10:9.

So the first requirement, as set forth by the prophet Micah some 2700 years ago is that we are to do justice. In the Bible, justice means fulfilling mutual obligations in a manner consistent with God's moral law. Justice is much more than legal equity; it refers to the entire scope of God's government of his world. Thus, to “do justice” involves, on the part of government, a fair and just use of power and proper functioning of a fair judicial system, especially to protect the weak from the strong. On the part of individuals, “justice” involves honest and fair business dealings and faithfulness to keep one's word, as well as not taking advantage of the poor or those with less power or protection. Justice means living with integrity. It’s not living by a set of hard and fast rules, but rather asking yourself if this action is honouring to God. Instead of writing the command as “to do justice”, the New Living Translation simply says, “to do what is right.” Throughout Scripture doing justice, or doing right, has often been directly linked to the widows, the orphans and the poor. In other words, the weak and the marginalized. In today’s society this demographic is not quite as noticeable as it was in ancient times, but it is still there. They are still there in the traditional sense, after all Jesus said that the poor would always be among us, but we can find those rejected by society elsewhere. Homosexuals, immigrants, the unborn and even those of a different skin colour tend to be rejected or shut out by many in our world. And it’s to these people that we have been given a specific mandate. But how do we administer this justice? The Bible gives some examples, “plead the widow’s cause”, and I can come up with some ideas, stand up in your workplace against discrimination towards those of a different ethnicity, but how that specifically works out in your life is something that needs to be a subject of prayer and reflection. It also means that we must know what justice looks like. Being regularly engaged in God’s Word helps us to do that. So the first charge is to do justice, or do what is right.

Micah’s second call was for God’s people to love kindness. The NIV translates this imperative “to love mercy”. This command resonates quite closely with the first since the both of them are expressions of love to God shown to fellow mankind. The story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:29-37 shows well what it means to love mercy. The priest and the scribe, the men who were supposed to be the spiritual leaders of Israel, passed the beaten and bloody man by in the interest of remaining clean and undefiled. Then the Samaritan, one of the marginalized people of the time walks by. He’s the guy in the story who is supposed to pass the Israelite by. The Israelites treated the Samaritans like dogs and they desperately despised each other. The apostles at one point asked Jesus if they could ask for fire to come down from heaven to consume a Samaritan village for denying them hospitality. But instead the Samaritan, whom no one would blame if he gave the Israelite a few shots while he was down, picked him up, cleaned him and generally spent his own time and money to make sure that the Israelite was well cared for. This was a man who loved kindness so much that he was willing to cross social, religious and political barriers in order to help a fellow man in need. In Luke 14:12-14 Jesus says: “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbours, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you. For you will be repaid at the resurrection of the just.” Once again, just like we saw earlier with the call for justice, the call for mercy is to the weak and the marginalized. The apostle John writes in 1 John 3:17 that “if anyone has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or talk but in deed and in truth.” Similarly, James asks in James 2:14-17: “What good is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, “Go in peace, be warmed and filled,” without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that? So also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead.” When I was down in California working with the church in McKinleyville last spring, it was incredible to me how visible the needy and the down and outers were. You’d see them on street corners and in front of restaurants. You couldn’t miss them. They’d come up to your car when you were stopped at a traffic light to ask for money. Here in rural Alberta, we don’t see so much of this obvious poverty, but that just means that it is below the surface. We don’t need to go to Mexico or Vancouver to find people in need. Having mercy or kindness isn’t something that you are to leave to the pastor and the church to organize, it’s a lifestyle that we have been called to live as followers of Christ. So we are to do justice and love kindness.

The third thing the Lord requires is for you and I to walk humbly with our God. In Genesis 5:21-24 we read the remarkable story of Enoch, the father of Methuselah. “When Enoch had lived 65 years, he fathered Methuselah. Enoch walked with God after he fathered Methuselah 300 years and had other sons and daughters. Thus all the days of Enoch were 365 years. Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him.” Enoch only lived 365 years, which was abnormally short when you look at the length of life that people in his day lived. What makes this more noteworthy is that Enoch didn’t die. He simply was there one day and not the next. The reason for this is found in verses 22 and 24 where it says “Enoch walked with God.” Hebrews 11:5 sheds more light on the story when it includes him in the infamous Hall of Faith by stating that, “By faith Enoch was taken up so that he should not see death, and he was not found, because God had taken him. Now before he was taken he was commended as having pleased God.” There is only one other man in history who has not tasted physical death, and that was Elijah in 2 Kings 2. Enoch’s life was lived well before Abraham, the nation of Israel, the Ten Commandments or any of the prescribed rituals or ceremonies that Isaiah, Amos and Micah like so much. So how did he manage to walk humbly with God and please him? This past week at camp I saw a t-shirt that said “Religion is against my relationship”. The godly men and women of faith in the aforementioned Hall of Faith in Hebrews were not there because they followed the rules; they were there because they had a real relationship with their Maker. Out of this relationship obedience was born. As with your earthly relationships, time and effort must be expended to have a deep and meaningful relationship with God. Now you can’t go golfing with God, or go out to Starbucks and discuss things over a latte, but you can still carry over principles that you’ve learned in your human relationships to your relationship with God. For those of you who are married, ask these questions about your spouse. For those of you who aren’t, think about your best friend. When you are with them do you just ask for things or complain about life? Do you talk all the time, not allowing them to fit a word in edgewise? Do you completely ignore them for weeks on end? If you were to do these things in an earthly friendship, you wouldn’t expect it to remain strong for long. So why do we, and I include myself in this, think that we can walk with God when we won’t invest in our relationship with him? If we are to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, He needs to be the thought that consumes our minds. When a person has fallen in love with another, they find it hard to keep their mind from wandering back to that person constantly. Or at least that’s been my experience, maybe I’m alone on this. This is how God wants us to love him. The best, and most reliable way to know God is through His revelation of Himself to us, His Word. His faithfulness in the past, both in the Bible and in our own lives, should be good enough reason for our faithfulness to Him in the present. So what does the Lord require of you but that you do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with the Lord your God? Absolutely nothing. Three simple things that take a lifetime to learn and integrate in your life and all of them are mindsets and heart attitudes rather than mindless drills you can check off and receive heaven points for. If you have trouble with remembering three different points, Jesus knocked it down to just two in the reading Dad had earlier. Matthew 22:34-40 says: But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” One of my friends boiled it down to “love God, love people.” Do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.

Jon Foreman. Some of you may know him, others don’t. He’s the lead singer of a band called Switchfoot. He writes a song using the words of Micah, Isaiah and Amos, but has written it to today’s world, and I’d like to share it with you to close this message.

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant, equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever. Amen.