What is Good?

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What does the LORD require of you?  To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God (Micah 6:8).

So because Jesus was doing these things on the Sabbath, the Jews persecuted him.  Jesus said to them, “My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working” (John 5:16-17).

It’s a bit complicated … but hang in there and allow the Holy Spirit to bring us further into the truth!

We’re heading into a new sermon series, Do Justice, Love Mercy, Walk Humbly. The “theme verse” for the series is Micah 6:8, quoted above: How does God require us to act?  To love?  To walk?  Jesus will be, as he always is, our exemplar, our master, our pioneer and perfecter. Week by week a Jesus-story will help our examination of the questions, “What is the good way to live?  What does God require?”

And, just to keep everyone alert and on our toes, we’re going to take the verbs from Micah 6:8—act, love, walk—in reverse order.  First, walking humbly with God, then loving mercy, then acting justly.

Ok, seat belts buckled?  Helmets on, chinstraps fastened?  Off we go!

Micah 6:8 didn’t drop alone from the sky.  Before it became printed on tee-shirts and bumper stickers, it was part of the Biblical book bearing Micah’s name, which was written around seven centuries before Christ.  Chapter 6 presents a dialogue between the LORD and his people; it has the feel of a courtroom drama, with the LORD serving as the prosecuting attorney (see verses 1-5).  Verses 6-8 then present the response of the faithful: “With what shall I come before the LORD …?  With burnt offerings, with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil …?  Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression…?”

Religious observance is good, necessary, and essential.  But it is not, in and of itself, sufficient for life in God.  Why?  Because it is all too easy for us to “do the religious stuff” for a little bit here and there, while our hearts remain far from God.  How can we tell where our hearts really are?  Not by looking at our “Sunday behavior,” but by looking at how we act, what we love, and how we walk with God all through the ordinary days of a normal week (whatever that means these days!)

John 5 opens with a healing miracle: a man paralyzed for thirty-eight years is commanded by Jesus to “Rise, take up your mat and walk,” and that’s what he does.  Jesus works this miracle on the Sabbath, so the “religion police” are offended.  Jesus has violated a core commandment, and compounds this “error” by saying that his Father is continuing his work and “like Father, like Son.”  Jesus is seen not only as a sabbath-breaker, but also as a blasphemer: by claiming a unique and hitherto unheard of relationship with the one Jesus called “My Father,” he was making himself equal to God!

Having just enabled a paralyzed man to walk again, Jesus responds to the accusations of the “religion police” by unpacking what it means to walk humbly with God: “My Father’s working, so I am working too” (verse17); “I don’t do anything on my own, I only do what I see my Father doing” (verses 18-19); “the Father loves the Son and shows him all he does” (verse 20).

Do you see Jesus’ humility, his subordinating himself—his will, his agenda, his preferences, his life—to “My Father”?  Do you see the unity to which this humility bears witness, Jesus simply and always doing whatever he sees his Father doing, walking humbly with his God?

“He has shown you, O man, what is good,” Micah wrote, seven hundred years before our story in John 5.  And what is good?  To follow Jesus into the kind of intimacy with the Father that enables us to say, with Jesus, “I’m joining our Father in his work; I only do what he’s showing me, what I see him doing.”  That’s the secret and heart of walking humbly with our God.

Scan the week ahead—what’s one thing you think you see your Father in heaven doing in your world this week?  How might you join that work, align yourself with what your Father is doing, and the ways in which he goes about doing it?

2 Comments

Thanks, Jan--great song "find"! Thanks for sharing it.
Great post! I found the song based on Micah 6:8.
https://youtu.be/jMZXGlYbKx4

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