Ministering Unto the Lord
By Rachel Davis
““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?”
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?”
Sometimes it feels unnecessary to unpack the message of verses like these because they are so beautifully simple and understandable! The clarity of God’s voice is so freeing, and it will be so good to meditate and sing these verses over the coming weeks and let their truth sink deeply into our hearts.
But as we have the privilege of filling a page with these verses, here are a few thoughts that stand out: Firstly, throughout the book, Micah’s burden and gift as a prophet seem to fluctuate between describing the present situation of Israel, her needs, sin and corruption, whilst pointing forward to the Messiah’s first and second coming – sometimes in the very same breath, certainly in consecutive verses. It made me think how we are called to live our lives between these 3 time planes;
Aware of the times we live in by acknowledging and understanding what the Lord is speaking to His Church right now and what He is allowing and working in the nations.
Living in friendship and union with Him because of His first coming as the Shepherd King who was born in the shadow of the Tower of the Flock (Micah 4: 8) in the fields of Boaz in Bethlehem, our Redeemer! He has made every provision for us to draw close and have real, pure, life-giving friendship with Him because of His sacrifice on the cross and resurrection. We can’t add to, much less improve, on that sacrifice!
And still we are called to persevere as the shadows get shorter before the dawn of His glorious unveiling and the revelation of Jesus Christ continues to gain momentum all over the earth as we hope for His second coming.
His call to us from Micah 6: 8 is refreshingly simple in the light of the dawn of His return - to keep walking in humility, in kindness and mercy, in enacting justice as modeled so sacrificially by His own unfailing love. The simplicity and clarity of the message hits us between the eyes and yet how we need the empowering of His Holy Spirit to live like this day in day out, and for the right reasons! It is a reminder of Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians, urging them to be prepared and aware of the Lord’s return but hammering home such practical tips as, keep working! Keep honouring God in the little, everyday things while you wait for Him! Keep growing in love! Keep walking the talk! Keep being full of faith!
The second thing that is striking is the contrast between how we want to offer up our worship (v 6-7) and how He asks us to walk it out (v 8). In all honesty, it is possible to be a serial striver and I have often felt as though I needed to impress Him (and as many people as possible while I’m at it) with offering up a calf or two by bringing Him some sort of impressive sacrifice. It is easy even for movements based around a pure call to worship and prayer to get lost in how impressive or sacrificial or lengthy their offerings are. I suppose none of this impresses God – He wants worshippers who carry His likeness, His image, His reactions into the real world where He longs for more of us to be drawn into friendship and closeness to Him.
And on the subject of walking humbly with your God (Simon Ponsonby explains this more fully in His book, Amazed by Jesus), you don’t walk comfortably with someone you are keeping at a distance; you walk to talk, to look at each other, to share reactions and thoughts and this is what we were created to do with Jesus right from the very beginning! Now it has been made possible because of His sacrifice and there is absolutely nothing of my own striving that I can add to improve the closeness and reality of this relationship. He’s the Giver and Provider of it all.
And finally, while thinking about this passage, I kept remembering a life changing moment in 2018 when I was attending the funeral of a young person who had spent her life worshipping and following Jesus. To be honest I felt like a spectator as I was really standing in for a friend who couldn’t be there and desperately wanted to attend. But I was so moved as her sister shared that as she had been about to go to Jesus, He had prepared her and her husband for her death and she had had a whole conversation with Him about her life. And she apparently said to her husband, “Jesus thanked me for cleaning the toilets when I didn’t feel like doing it. And He thanked me for raising my arms in worship when it was becoming really painful to do so. And He said thank you to me for forgiving someone who had hurt me.” And then she laughed with her husband and said, “Funny, He didn’t even mention my CD!” I find it so moving that God sees the little acts of kindness, the small but costly decisions to pursue mercy and forgiveness, the often unglamorous acts of pure love worked out in the practical expressions and He notices them! How humble is our God!
And please know, wherever you are, your worship, especially the unseen and unhyped, faltering, broken but real part is a pure delight and a wonderful fragrance to Him! He has chosen us to be His humble friends, to walk with Him, looking at Him, looking like Him and as we worship Him and absorb His words, His likeness in us will continue to be formed, and will have a real practical outworking through our lives, and the many expressions He has already built into us for these to be realised. God bless you all – you are doing a beautiful thing for Him in Manchester. And let’s keep putting these very practical verses into effect, even more so as we recognise we are a lot closer to our Messiah’s return than when Micah first wrote down his visions!
