Things from God's Hand

Micah 6:1-8

January 9, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Over the last year or so, probably due in part to the tremendous stress our society has been experiencing, there has been a huge pushback on people who offer to pray for someone or for some event. Especially online, when some catastrophe happens, people say, “I’ll be praying,” the response is often along the lines of, “Why don’t you do something?” The implication is that prayer, while maybe a nice thought, is useless. But for the Christian, there is nothing better we can do for someone. Prayer is not the only thing we can do, but it should be the first thing. That’s the model of the Scriptures. In fact, you don’t get very far into the Bible before you run into prayer. Genesis 4: “At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord” (4:26). And I’d even argue that, at the very beginning, Adam and Eve were engaging in prayer when they walked with God in the garden in the evenings (Genesis 3:8). Is there a better description of prayer than “walking with God”? The model for us as believers is that prayer is not the only thing we do, but it is the first thing.

You move on through the Scripture and people are constantly praying. They’re not always kneeling and saying formal prayers, though sometimes they are. But they are constantly interacting with God, so much so that Charles Spurgeon, a great preacher of an earlier age, once wrote this: “A prayerless soul is a Christless soul.” He went on to describe our need this way: “So deep are our necessities that we must not cease to pray until our earthly life is over. Do you need nothing? Then I am afraid you do not know your poverty. Do you have no mercy to ask from God? Then may the Lord's mercy show you your misery!” (Morning by Morning, January 2). Those words hit me hard, and it’s because of the absolute necessity of prayer in the Christian life that we’re spending these first few weeks of the new year focused on what is often called “The Wesley Covenant Prayer.” I introduced it to you (again) last week, and I invited you to pray it at least once a day for these three weeks. Last week, we began by looking at the twin themes of surrender and suffering that show up in the first part of the prayer. Today, we move into the middle of the prayer that focuses on our attitude. We’ll pray the whole thing at the end of the message this morning, but right now let’s read together this middle part of the prayer:

Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,

Exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

To thy pleasure and disposal.

So, yes, that is a lot, and if we’re going to be able to really pray these words, as opposed to just repeating and forgetting them, we need to remember the context. Wesley was constantly spurring those early Methodists on to fulfill God’s mission. He was bent on reaching the world for Jesus, “to spread Scriptural holiness across the land.” Today we express that mission this way: “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” And to be able to do that was going to require a certain kind of person, a man or woman shaped by the Scriptures, filled with the Holy Spirit and with a surrendered heart. It was going to require the kind of person Micah described so many centuries before Mr. Wesley composed his prayer.

Verse 8 in this passage is one of those most “memorable and timeless” verses of the Old Testament; in many ways, it sums up all of the Hebrew Bible’s ethical expectations (cf. McComiskey, “Micah,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 7, pg. 436). But it’s set in a much larger context that is actually a legal argument, a case God (through the prophet Micah) is bringing against his people, Israel (cf. Waltke in Obadiah, Jonah, Micah [Tyndale OT Vol. 23a], pg. 191). “The Lord has a case against his people,” Micah says, “he is lodging a charge against Israel” (6:2). And God’s charge is this: Israel has taken the covenant God offered them and turned it into a contract. We tend to do the same thing, usually because we don’t understand the difference. A covenant is based in a relationship, and it’s all about doing what is necessary to build or strengthen the bonds between two persons or two parties—in this case, between God and Israel. There may be requirements or expectations, but they are things that help or enhance the relationship, make it stronger. A contract, on the other hand, doesn’t require a relationship. I have a contract with Duke Energy, for instance. As long as I pay my bill, they keep the power flowing to my house. I give them money, they give me electricity. But I don’t have a relationship with Duke Energy. I don’t invite them over for Christmas dinner. What we have is a contract, a legal arrangement, not a covenant. A marriage, on the other hand, is a covenant; it’s based in a relationship. When a man and a woman make the vows to each other—for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer and so on—those are promises to each other that are rooted in relationship. David Lowes Watson described a covenant as a promise that you make in a time of strength that holds onto you in a time of weakness. That’s a pretty good definition. And that’s why God’s charge against Israel is so serious in this passage. They have taken the promises God made to them and turned those promises into relationship-less obligations.

So God reminds them of all he has done for them, how he has led them out of slavery, how he formed them into a people, how he protected them in times of threat, how he went with them in their journeys (6:3-5). And the sacrifices he expected were meant to be the people’s grateful response, a way to thank God for what he has done. Instead, the indication is that they were offering their sacrifices either as empty rituals (just something they did because they felt like they had to) or as ways to get more from God. Their offerings had become more like, “How much do I have to give to get what I want?” Micah gets at that when he asks the question, “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?” (6:6). The people were like: how can we reach or “grab the ear” of this God on high, this God who (they believed) was far, far away and had to have something big to get his attention. They acted like God was just like the gods of the people around them.

So Micah begins a list. Maybe it will take a burnt offering of a year-old calf; those were more expensive (Waltke 194). If that’s not enough, maybe they could bring thousands of rams? Or maybe ten thousand rivers of olive oil. And then there is the most horrendous suggestion of all: “Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” The highest bid for God’s attention: child sacrifice. “The firstborn represents the most precious thing one could give to God” (McComiskey 436). The nations around Israel often practiced child sacrifice, and certain Israelites also had on certain occasions, but generally (and certainly Biblically) child sacrifice (actually, all human sacrifice) was considered evil by the Hebrew people. So in many ways, this suggestion shows how far they have fallen. Even the idea that they might have to sacrifice a child to get God’s attention, to get God to honor his “contract,” shows you how far they have wandered or fallen from what God really wanted. They have turned their covenant into a contract (cf. McComiskey 436; Waltke 195). They have begun trusting in their own thinking, their own intellect, rather than in God’s leading, God’s direction.

Do we ever do the same? Do we ever keep God at a distance until we need him, until we’ve gotten in trouble and need help getting out? Do we assume that our political party or political candidate is by default God’s? Do we honestly allow our faith to influence our daily life or do we keep the two separate? Do we pray before a meeting and then do whatever we want anyway? As Old Testament scholar John Goldingay puts it, “It’s easy for us to use intelligence and creativity in a way that imposes the results of our thinking on God” (Daniel & the Twelve Prophets for Everyone, pg. 176). In other words, it’s easy for us to slip from a covenant into contract thinking and living.

But God has not left us alone. “He has shown you, O mortal, what is good,” Micah says in the next verse. We’re not left wondering. Micah spells out what the Lord “requires” of us in this most famous of verses (6:8). Three things: “To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (6:8). “Act justly” is literally “do justice.” And that’s not about doing the right thing or even just the legal thing; it’s about doing what is ethical and fair to everyone. It’s about doing what God would do in each and every situation. This instruction does not allow Israel or us to be indifferent to others. Acting justly calls us to pay attention to what’s going around us, in our neighborhood and in the larger culture. And beyond paying attention, it calls us to act, to live out our faith in the wider world, to be Jesus and do what Jesus would do. Several years ago, a book written in 1896 caught on again and ignited a movement. The book was In His Steps by Charles Sheldon, which told the story of a pastor who preached a sermon challenging his church to always ask the question, “What would Jesus do?” when approaching any and every situation. The novel follows the lives of those who do just that and tells of the way they and their world changed because of that question. A hundred years after its first publication, that question caught on again and the WWJD movement was born. But that shouldn’t have been a new or revolutionary question. It’s the first command Micah gives. It’s one of the things God expects: act justly.

So if we’re going to be in covenant with God, then stand against things that are unjust. We stand against systems and persons who oppress others, focusing on what is actually unjust rather than lumping everyone into one category. We treat others as children of God; I mean, that’s the essence of what Jesus said about treating others the way you want to be treated (cf. Matthew 7:12). If we are all children of God, then we all deserve to be treated equally and fairly. And we confront issues in our wider community which we know break God’s heart. This past summer, on our trip to Birmingham, I got to work alongside some of our youth at a place called Grace Klein Ministries. Grace Klein is a food reclamation ministry; they take food that restaurants and grocery stores are throwing out, food that is still good but for whatever reason they can no longer sell, and they redistribute it to food pantries and places of need. We sorted I don’t know how many pounds of food in the two days we worked there, and we sorted some really nasty produce. But even the nasty produce didn’t go to waste; farmers would take the stuff we wouldn’t eat for their animals. I spoke with the director during the week and she told me they bring in thousands of pounds of food every week and all of it is gone by Friday because there is tremendous food insufficiency—and not just in Birmingham. Working there has made me more conscious of those issues here since coming home, and it’s made me realize that sometimes acting justly looks like being up to your elbows in expired lettuce.

Act justly. Love mercy. I’ve taught you this word before; it’s one of the few Hebrew words I know: hesed. It’s one of those words that demonstrates the challenges of Bible translation because there’s no one word that easily conveys the full meaning of this word. It’s been translated in 169 different ways across 6 English translations, the most common ways being “mercy,” “grace,” “kindness” or even the compound “lovingkindness.” The best translation of its idea is this: when the one who owes you nothing gives you everything (cf. Card, Inexpressible, pg. 5). It’s getting what you don’t deserve—in a good way (cf. McComiskey 436). The ultimate demonstration of hesed, of course, is Jesus, who gave his life away so that we, who don’t deserve mercy, could receive it from God the Father. It’s when that person whom you have hurt by harsh words and unkind attitudes offers to forgive you, to restore your relationship. Mercy is that thing that we all want, and we love it when it comes our way, but Micah is talking about the way we show mercy, not the way we receive it. God calls us to love mercy so much that it’s our default response to someone who has hurt us, who has injured us, who has been unkind or even threatening to us. Rather that just receiving what Jesus did for us on the cross, Micah’s call here is to be like Jesus on the cross who prayed about the ones who crucified him, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Michael Card tells of being part of a multiracial prayer group early on in his ministry, and while the group genuinely loved each other, it bothered him that on Sunday mornings, they were all in separate and separated churches. He decided one thing he could do was to take part in the worship of First Missionary Baptist, a black church pastored by his friend Denny Denson. The first Sunday he attended, he was the only white person in the church, and he sat down in a pew with Dinah Smith. After the music and the announcements, the message began and it was at that point that Dinah reached over and grabbed Michael’s hand. Card says he didn’t know what to do. He looked around to see if anyone else was holding hands; maybe this was a tradition he was unfamiliar with. But no, it was just Dinah. So they sat there, and when the pastor would make a good point, she would give his hand a little squeeze. At the end of the sermon, Dinah smiled at Michael and said, “I hope you’ll be back.” Later, Card learned that Dinah and her husband Bob had fostered over 75 children and adopted many of them. When people asked why she did that, Dinah’s response was always the same: “If I don’t love them, who will?” Card says he realized that Dinah holding his hand that morning was an act of hesed—undeserved mercy—that was born out of that same heart. If she didn’t love this stranger, who would? He writes, “I had done absolutely nothing to deserve her kindness. I had simply shown up with all my mixed motives. But she reached out to me and took my hand” (Card 59-61).

Act justly. Love mercy. And walk humbly. I love the image of walking there, because it implies movement, moving forward. And the word includes the idea of bringing our lives into conformity with God’s will, moving more toward what God wants for our lives and for our world (Waltke 196). And this gets us back to our prayer, because this whole middle section is focused on asking God to shape us and mold us and help us become more like him, to become the people he dreams we would become. All of those opposites, which flow out of the spirit of surrender we talked about last week, lead to the point where we humbly accept the direction and the mission God has for us. “Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee…” I am surrendering to whatever you want for me, God, and that’s why the climax of this middle section of the prayer is found in these words: “I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.” Freely. Heartily. Yield. Things that don’t normally follow after we’ve told God we are okay being full or empty, exalted or brought low, having all things or having nothing. To approach life in this way requires the humility to accept whatever comes from God’s hand as part of his mission for the world and for our lives.

Pastor Chris Folmsbee tells of taking his confirmation class to volunteer at a nonprofit agency in their town. It was a place that took in and distributed household goods for those who were addicts in recovery or who had just been released from prison. When they arrived, they were told their job was to organize the goods on the third floor, and so they spent the whole day doing that. Pastor Chris says he was glad he had fourteen young, strong and energetic kids to rely on. When they left, eight hours later, everything was organized and they were proud of their efforts. A week later, Pastor Chris took three boys back to the same agency. These boys had missed the first work day and serving was a mandatory aspect of their confirmation class. When they walked in, they were told they needed to go to the third floor and organize the things up there. Pastor Chris said, “Third floor, you sure?” “Yes,” the lady said. “Last weekend, another group came in and made a total mess of it! It needs to be organized.” So they trooped up to the third floor and found that what she said was true; their eight hours of work the week before had been tossed aside and the room was a mess again. At the next Confirmation class, Pastor Chris shared what happened, and then one of the students spoke up. “It doesn’t matter, Chris,” the student said. “We did it to serve the best way we could, and that’s what we did.” That’s humility of a sort—serving regardless of the outcome, regardless of the response. Serving because that’s how God calls us to live. Walking humbly with God means we show God’s love to the world, recognize that he is God and we are not, which means we serve his mission, not the other way around. Or, as one author puts it, “The Church does not have a mission; the mission has a Church” (Folmsbee, The Wesley Prayer Challenge, pgs. 90-92). The mission, God’s mission, always takes priority, which is why we pray, “I freely and heartily yield all things to thy pleasure and disposal.”

Micah, and the rest of the Scripture for that matter, reminds us that God has no interest in empty religious rituals, nor does he have interest in repeating empty words of prayer (cf. McComiskey 436). That doesn’t mean that the rituals or the prayers and other acts of worship we do are useless; the key word in that idea is “empty.” What God doesn’t want is for us to do religious-looking or sounding things without living a life that matches what we say we believe. Jeremiah, one of the prominent Old Testament prophets, said that the sacrifices (the worship acts of his time) would be accepted if the people were obedient (cf. Jeremiah 17:24-26), if they lived the mission God gave them. You see, God’s people have always been people on a mission—a mission to bless the whole world by helping them come to know their creator and savior. What God wants are hearts yielded to him, who are willing to wholeheartedly and fully say, “I yield all things to you.” What God wants are people who act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with him, who are willing to receive what he gives, the things from God’s hand, and serve him faithfully. Paul, standing on the foundation Micah provided, shows the way to those of us who follow Jesus: “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity” (Colossians 3:12-14). Now, there’s a whole lot in those three short verses, but the bottom line is this: act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.

So the reason we are spending time with this prayer here at the beginning of the year is because I’m convinced from reading the Scriptures that nothing happens without God’s people first praying. But not just praying; our prayers need more than ever before to be shaped by God’s heart. We need reminding that we are God’s people; we are not our own. We need reminding that our lives have been given over to his mission, not our own. We need to remember whose we are. This prayer does all of that and can, if we will let it, shape our own prayer lives. Remember what I shared from Charles Spurgeon at the beginning this morning: “A prayerless soul is a Christless soul.” Let me close with just a bit more of Spurgeon’s teaching on prayer: Prayer “is the breath, the watchword, the comfort, the strength, and the honor of a Christian. If you are a child of God, you will seek your Father’s face and live in your Father's love.” It’s not optional; prayer is our soul’s very breath.

So, since I’ve challenged and encouraged you to pray this prayer every day during this series, let’s pray it together again this morning as we move into our time of prayer this morning. I invite you to join me in praying—not just reciting but in praying—this covenant prayer.

I am no longer my own, but thine.

Put me to what thou wilt, rank me with whom thou wilt.

Put me to doing, put me to suffering.

Let me be employed by thee or laid aside for thee,

Exalted for thee or brought low for thee.

Let me be full, let me be empty.

Let me have all things, let me have nothing.

I freely and heartily yield all things

To thy pleasure and disposal.

And now, O glorious and blessed God,

Father, Son and Holy Spirit,

Thou art mine, and I am thine. So be it.

And the covenant which I have made on earth,

Let it be ratified in heaven. Amen.