What does God want?
There is a little-known prophet named Micah.
Micah’s name means, “Who is like Jehovah?”
God commissioned this spokesman to clear up any miscalculation.
If you have ever wondered just what it is God wants from you, we will find out from scripture and you will never have to speculate.
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Grace Fellowship Church
Buddy Hoffman
Series: True
November 16, 2014
True Hope: God, What Do You Want from Me?
Micah
You guys have been going through the Minor Prophets. I have a little graphic here, and the way the Bible is organized is not… You always ought to remember that the Bible is not a book; it is a library, and it’s God’s library, and you can actually arrange it several different ways. The arrangement itself is not what matters so much, but when they arranged the way we have the Protestant Bible, it’s actually different than they way they arranged the Hebrew Bible. Same books, but they arranged them differently.
The Protestant Bible we have, this part over here is the same. It’s the Law, sometimes called the Torah, those first five books. Then you get what is sometimes called, what we call, the History books. The Hebrews called them the Writings. But these Joshua, Judges, Ruth… Actually Ruth is moved over into another section. But 1 and 2 Samuel are one book; 1 and 2 Kings are one book; 1 and 2 Chronicles are one book; Ezra, Nehemiah are one book.
Then you have what are sometimes referred to as the Wisdom or Poetry sections. Then you have the Major Prophets, Minor Prophets, the Gospels, and then Acts is kind of turned crooked there because it’s History. Then you have all these letters that are the Epistles. I don’t know why these words come about like epistles. Nobody last week used that word epistle, but we get stuck on these words. An epistle is not an apostle’s wife. An epistle is just a little letter. Then you have Revelation.
Now where we at Snellville have been is in these Minor Prophets. You have these Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets. Now the difference in the Major Prophets and the Minor Prophets are not some… Like the Minor Prophets aren’t quite as important as the Major Prophets. I never really have enjoyed this Minor Prophet category to tell you the truth. It’s like you’re playing baseball and you’re in the Minor Leagues.
The Minor Prophets are called Minor Prophets because they’re shorter in length than in the Major Prophets, but they’re not historically necessarily in order. For instance, you have Jonah there, and in his involvement with Jonah… I love that book of Jonah. The people who he was dealing with (the historical background) weren’t the Babylonians; they were the Assyrians.
If you’re watching the news today, you’re hearing about the group ISIS, and you’re hearing about Mosul. Mosul is the same geographic location, same city, they just call it a different name, as Nineveh. They were every bit as bad as ISIS. They loved cutting people’s heads off and making pyramids out of people’s heads. They were just horrid people. They would impale people on spikes. They were horrid, horrid people.
Can you imagine waking up in the middle of the night in this vision and God says to you, “I want you to go and preach the gospel to ISIS”? So in the morning you get up (although you didn’t go back to sleep), and you’re sitting there with your cup of coffee, and you say to Mrs. Jonah, “Mrs. Jonah, I had a dream last night, a vision, and God wants me to go to Mosul and talk to the ISIS people, and God says he’s going to send revival among the ISIS.”
“Jonah, you need to see a doctor. You have totally lost your mind. Are you crazy? They will kill you!”
“I don’t particularly want to go myself. Maybe you’re right. Spain sounds better.” So that’s what he did. He went down, got on a boat, bought a ticket to go to Tarshish, which is modern-day Spain, and got caught in the middle of this massive storm, and they decide, “Okay, this has got to be God punishing us. Somebody fess up.” Jonah goes, “Okay, it’s me. Throw me overboard.” “Okay.” Boom! Throw him overboard. Big fish swallows him up.
Now then it’s a very interesting thing that happens. When we don’t do what God wants us to do, he has a way of changing our minds. How many of you have raised kids? How many of you have ever said to your kids, “I think you need an attitude adjustment”? God knows how to adjust our attitudes. Not just to make us obey, but how to make us want to obey.
So he’s in the belly of the great fish, and he goes, “It would really be quite a joy, God, if you’d just let me go to Mosul.” So he heads up to Mosul, but even during the process, he’s mad at these folks. He doesn’t like them. He really wants them to go to hell. One of the reasons he doesn’t want to go up to Nineveh is because he says, “If I go up to Nineveh and I announce to them the gospel, they’re going to repent, and revival is going to break out, and you’re going to hear their prayer, and they’re going to come into the kingdom, and that really ticks me off.”
He went up there. I just can’t imagine what a bad attitude he has. He’s walking through the city. “Forty days, Nineveh. Repent. God is going to destroy you.” That’s not much of a preacher. But he’s going through, he’s announcing the news, and they go, “Whoa! We need to repent.” The whole city repents.
Do you know what happens? He’s mad! He goes and sits over outside the city, looking over the city, and do you know what he says? “God, I knew you were going to do that. Now look at them. I’m going to have to be in heaven with these people. I don’t like them.” You might be surprised that that stuff is in the Bible, and you’d probably have to read through Jonah two or three times to get out of it as much as I just gave you.
Now when you look at these dozen Minor Prophets, right in there is this book we refer to as Micah. Now that’s the right English pronunciation of it, but the Hebrew, the word actually is Michah. The reason that dominates my mind is the first couple of times I went to Israel our guide was named Michah, and he reminded me over and over again how we mispronounce Micah. I said, “Well, we’re not Hebrews. We’re Southern people, and we have all kinds of ways.” It takes a very uncreative person to figure out only one way to say something.
So if you have a Bible there with you, open it up to the book of Micah, and I want to read a couple of passages with you, and I want them to really be the anchor of where we’re going to go. Now if you write in your Bible or take notes, the word Micah (sorry, Michah) literally means “Who is like God?” It’s more than a question; it’s a declaration that there is no God like our God.
Actually, over in chapter 7, look at verse 18. He says, “Where is another God like you…” Where is there another God like you? Then he specifies some things about God that are really unique. He says, “…who pardons the guilt of the remnant, overlooking the sins of his special people? You will not stay angry with your people forever, because you delight in showing unfailing love.
Once again you will have compassion on us. You will trample our sins under your feet and throw them into the depths of the ocean! You will show us your faithfulness and unfailing love as you promised to our ancestors Abraham and Jacob long ago.” (Micah 7:18-20) The great question here is about the nature of God, that God is not like the manmade gods of the surrounding communities.
What we tend to do sometimes is shape God into our image, to form this image and idea of God that is not really who God is. In that day, there were surrounding cultures that had these ideas of God that were just… Like if you think about the Greek deities or imagined deities like Zeus. If you read about the pantheon of gods that lived in mythology upon Mount Olympus, they’re nasty people. I mean, they really are. They’re just bad people.
Zeus has an affair with another one of the gods, and he thinks the baby is ugly, and he throws the baby off the mountain and kills the baby. You start looking through all these gods of the Greeks and the gods of the Assyrians. The gods of the Assyrians were awful people, just awful people. If you look at the gods of the Canaanites and the Amorites, it’s hard to even imagine and even speak in a public environment about how they viewed their gods. The gods of the Amorites and the Canaanites were big into child sacrifice, and you were to take your firstborn child…
Now just imagine this for just a moment. This is the kind of gods they were surrounded with. They had this big religious shrine, and the bottom of this shrine was this brass pan, and there was a fire that was built under this brass pan, and up along the side of it there was a place where you would go and you would take your child and you would place the child up on this slide that went down into this heated pan that was burning, and it was razor sharp, and it would slice the child in two, and it would just fry in this pan.
What God is saying is, “Listen, the ideas you have about God, the gods that surround you, God is not like that at all.” The very name Micah/Michah means “Who is like our God?” The question we should ask ourselves this morning is…Do we know this God? Are we familiar with this God? What does this God really want from us?
It’s an interesting book. You find powerful stuff that’s here. If you look at chapter 5, verse 2, he says, “But you, Bethlehem…” which when you see that word beth it means house. Bethlehem is house of bread. “…Ephrathah…” So he’s naming a specific location, a specific Bethlehem, a little small town. “…though you are little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of you shall come forth to me the One to be Ruler in Israel, whose goings forth are from of old, from everlasting.” (Micah 5:2)
Thirty-eight days till Christmas. Thirty-eight days. How many of you love the Christmas season? Thirty-eight days. Okay. There used to be some level of common agreement that you didn’t drag the Christmas stuff out till after Thanksgiving. Does anybody remember that? No putting up trees, no lights, no Christmas music, nothing until you got through Thanksgiving. The idea, quite frankly, was that before you get to greed, take a little time and stop with gratitude. Now we just blow right through the gratitude and go straight to greed.
But when this was written with Micah, you’re looking at 750 years before the first Christmas. Can you imagine that? Seven hundred and fifty years there is a prophecy and there is a place. One of the things that bring us incredible confidence in Scripture is the specific nature of the prophecies of Scripture.
One of Micah’s counterparts and contemporaries is Isaiah. In Isaiah 7:14, it says, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel.” (Isaiah 7:14) Which means “God with us.” So 750 years before the Messiah comes, before the Word is made flesh and dwells among us, before the wise men, before Mary, before it all, 750 years the Scriptures name the place and the methodology.
Isaiah 9:6-7 says, “For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given; and the government will be upon His shoulder. And His name will be called Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Of the increase of His government and peace there will be no end, upon the throne of David and over His kingdom, to order it and establish it with judgment and justice from that time forward, even forever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.” (Isaiah 9:6-7)
So we have this Micah and he’s prophesying, and he’s saying, “Listen, the Messiah is going to come.” He’s talking about the fact that God is not like the gods of the heathen. When you start studying, the gods that are promoted out there, the gods of the Hindus and the gods that are promoted and the gods that were of the pagan deities, there is no other god anywhere like who Jesus is.
In this, you have this great Christmas question. Look at Micah 6:6. This is where we’re going to spend the rest of our time this morning. “What can we bring to the Lord? Should we bring him burnt offerings? Should we bow before God Most High with offerings of yearling calves? Should we offer him thousands of rams and ten thousand rivers of olive oil? Should we sacrifice our firstborn children to pay for our sins?” (Micah 6:6-7)
So there are these hypothetical questions of things that really are symbolic and poetic in nature. What would be worthy of giving to God? Now this is an opposite question than we normally ask at Christmas. Normally at Christmas concerning the incarnation, the way we celebrate Christmas is, “What do we want for Christmas?” What do you want for Christmas? Quite frankly, we even indoctrinate our children. “What do you want for Christmas?”
Micah reverses that question, and he says to Yahweh, to God, “God, what would you like for Christmas?” But is also is quite reflective of a problem that we see in a lesser form of us as adults. Say you have a child, maybe they’re 6 or 7 years old, and they walk up to you and they say, “Dad, what do you want for Christmas?”
Now the reality is anything that child could give you you could get yourself. Correct? Maybe I’m just too spoiled, but anything that my children or my grandchildren could get me for Christmas I would just go buy myself, and it would fit. Anything I really, really want, they can’t afford!
So the question, “Well, God, what do you want for Christmas? What can we bring you that would really bring joy to your heart, God?” Now I think every one of us…I believe this from the very center of my being…that if you know God at all, there is something within us that we have this desire that we could give back to God and God would look down and go, “Yeah, thanks. That’s a good thing.”
Well, verse 8 answers the question, “What does God want?” Look at Micah 6:8. “No, O people, the Lord has told you what is good…” Do you want to know what’s a good thing to give God? “Your sacrifices, your olive oil, all those things, that’s not really what I want. I’ll tell you what is a good thing to give thing to give God.”
And not only what is a good thing, he says, “…and this is what he requires…” This is what he requires. That’s stronger than just what he wants. This is what he requires of you, and it’s three things. Look at what it says. “…to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” (Micah 6:8)
Now I don’t have time to do this with you this morning, but if you go back and you read through Micah, what you will find is the book of Micah is compiled of three sermons Micah preaches, and each of those sermons, the primary theme are these three things. The first sermon is really comprised with this idea of doing the right thing. He wants us to do the right thing. The second sermon is primarily composed of loving mercy. Loving kindness it’s sometimes translated.
The third one, and the one I really want to focus in on this morning, is to walk humbly with your God. Do you know what he’s saying here? “What I really, really want is I want you. I want your presence. I want to spend time with you. I don’t want your stuff. I want you.” Let’s work our way through these three just in the next two hours.
I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time on this one, but the first one is a simple one. Just do the right thing. God wants us to do the right thing. I know sometimes we say, “Oh, you know, it’s all about mercy. It’s all about grace. It’s all about…” but listen, God is concerned that if we are people who are his people and we represent his name that we reflect his character. So don’t fall into this idea that you can live one way and act like you believe another way, because if we really believe this it will affect how we behave.
Now I’m going to throw something at you. God is always on the side of the oppressed. When you go back to the book of Exodus and later on in Micah, it reminds them of this. He says, “Remember when you were slaves. Remember when you were under the oppression of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh was saying, ‘I’m God.’ You were commissioned by me to go because the people were living under oppression.”
They cried out, “God, deliver us,” and those prayers came up before God and God says, “I have come down because I have heard the prayers. I’ve heard the cries of the oppressed.” Now it may surprise you, it may not surprise you, you may believe me, you may not believe me, but the reality is there are more people who are living in slavery today than there were at the time of the Civil War.
Now the question we have to ask ourselves is…Do we care? Do we care? Probably, and I will include myself in this, the very clothes we wear today, some of those clothes were made in places where people were enslaved who made those clothes. If you look in the nations of Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, you start naming off these nations, the phone systems we use, in China, many of these places, the products we enjoy are produced by people who live in absolute, utter slavery.
That’s not only true overseas. In the United States, there are people who are enslaved. There is sexual slavery. There is domestic slavery. There are all kinds of things. You say, “Well, I don’t know what I can do about that.” Well, one thing we can do about that is be informed and care! Care. Do we care?
Listen, some of you are going to think I’m a social liberal here, but look, I have good redneck credentials. In our city, there is no child who should go hungry. There is no excuse that any child should go to bed hungry at night. None! None. You say, “Well, what are we supposed to do about it?” I’m not sure. I know this. I know it ought to make us mad. It makes God mad. God says, “Listen, do the right thing. Do the right thing.”
One of the things that blesses me about this church, about Grace Fellowship and the Grace family of churches, is that there is a deep social consciousness of those who are orphans and those who are widows. I had no idea until they called us. In Gwinnett County, Grace Snellville has more foster homes available than any church in Gwinnett County. Isn’t that cool?
But do you realize that if the churches in Gwinnett County just said, “We’ll take one,” if all the churches in Gwinnett County said, “We’ll take one foster child,” there would not be any foster children. Do the right thing. Do the right thing. Be aware. Don’t take advantage of people, particularly the disadvantaged.
The second thing he says is love mercy. There’s a great passage where he describes this reality that the Messiah is going to come, and this Messiah in John 1, it says he is full of truth and grace. What we find in this Messiah and when we think about this thing of mercy, and it’s sometimes translated a loving kindness, it’s the covenant nature of God. That when God made a covenant with Abraham, it’s not a spontaneous emotional thing; it is a decision that is made to act always in the best interest of the person in covenant.
God has made up his mind. He is always going to act toward us for our best interest. He says, “Listen, I want you to do the same thing. I want you to look at people and I want you to move toward them in a way that is always in their best interest. Love mercy.” Now I have to tell you, there are people who don’t just elicit merciful feelings out of me. Oh, I can tell by the way you laugh you’re with me in this. One of the songs I absolutely love that Rich Mullins wrote says this:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
I cannot find in my own
And He keeps His fire burning
To melt this heart of stone
Keeps me aching with a yearning
Keeps me glad to have been caught
In the reckless raging fury
That they call the love of God.
There is no explanation for this love God shows toward us. Psalm 136, and I’m not going to read it through with you this morning, more than 26 times just says that God is merciful, God is merciful, God is merciful, God is merciful, God is merciful. With each one of those 26 repetitions, it says something specific about the fact that God is merciful. Mercy is God not giving us what we deserve!
So many times we run around and we keep books on everybody. Listen, practice just letting people off the hook. Some of you have had people who have offended you, they’ve done you wrong, there’s no excuse for it, but the best thing you could do for them and you is just let it go. Why? Because God let you go! Do you want justice? I don’t. I want mercy. If I want to be like God, I have to have the same kind of mercifulness that God has.
Let me just tell you something. If you will learn mercy, you won’t be as mad all the time. Some of you know what I mean. Some of you just walk around, you’re mad all the time. Somebody cuts in front of you, you want to just blow your horn. I had a friend, he blew his horn so much I disconnected it. It gave me such a thrill. We’re riding down the road, somebody cut him off, and he’d start trying to blow his horn, and it wouldn’t blow, and he said, “I don’t know what’s wrong with that horn!” I do.
Just let it go. I mean, how much does that cost you? Let it go. Somebody jumps in line in front of you. “Hey, that’s not fair!” No, it’s not fair, but so what? So what? Let it go. Your wife doesn’t do what you want her to do. Listen, I have some really breaking news for you. No wife does what you want her to do! If you happen to be married to some woman who does what you want her to do, she’s probably crazy, man. Listen, I don’t do what I want to do. I treat myself badly. Let it go.
Become a person who isn’t so prickly. Listen, the church has a reputation of being prickly, that we’re easily offended, that we have this kind of Nixon and his enemy list. I don’t mean we should not preach against sin, but let me tell you something. When the world identifies the church as people who are basically only against everything, what do you think… I mean, do you really imagine we’re going to attract them to the gospel? Say no. No, you know it’s not true.
Do you realize that Jesus was a friend of sinners? He might’ve even had a friend that was a homosexual. “Oh no, Jesus would’ve never had a friend who was a homosexual.” He might’ve had a friend who was lesbian. “Oh, they didn’t have lesbians back then, did they?” I’m not going any further. You do know I had a stroke, right?
The third thing, and I just really wanted to spend a lot more time on this, is walk humbly with God. Do you know what he’s saying? “I just want to spend time with you.” There’s a Christmas song I’ve been listening to. Isn’t that crazy? Listen to the questions though.
How many kings step down from their thrones?
How many lords have abandoned their homes?
How many greats have become the least for me?
And how many gods have poured out their hearts
To romance a world that is torn all apart
How many fathers gave up their sons for me?
Only one. When I say that we need to know God, I don’t mean, “Are you saved?” I don’t mean, “Are you sure you’re going to heaven when you die?” I don’t mean, “Do we have confidence our sins are forgiven?” I don’t mean, “Do we know about God?” What I mean is, “Do we really have an intimate relationship with him?”
It might be better phrased, “Are we possessed with an inescapable passion to live in an intimate knowledge of God?” Do we know him personally? Would he call us, “Hey, he’s my friend”? Abraham was called the friend of God. David was called the man after God’s own heart. Lazarus was called Jesus’ friend.
We ask, “What’s the problem?” and the problem is pretty simple. It’s not so much that we are engaged and actively aggressively evil; it’s that we are just too active. It’s not that we are criminally engaged; we’re just inattentive to the voice of God. It’s not that we’re heretics. Most people I know are just hectic in their activities of mind-numbing nothingness.
It should make sense to anyone that minds empty of God will be empty of meaning. Our hunger for God is numbed by our addictions to substitutes and stimulants that hide our starving souls. We’re spiritual anorexics. We’ve morphed into a point where we don’t even recognize what is the spiritual norm. Today’s lifestyle is lived at a pace that makes contemplation all but impossible, and most people cannot imagine a life like Jesus lived.
We can’t imagine a life without constant informational connectivity. We live in a noisy world where there is a lot competing for our attention…TV, phones, Facebook, emails. But the unintended consequence of constant informational connectivity is divine disconnection. We are so distracted with inconsequential information. Our brains and our hearts are overloaded with timely data leaving no space for timeless deity.
We’re called to live in a preoccupation with God who is worthy to be pursued at all costs and is pursuing us. We find ourselves in an age that has pushed the knowledge of God into the margins, and we arrogantly assume that God should be grateful for the crumbs of our overcrowded schedule.
We call it efficient, but God has not called us first to be efficient; he has called us to be passionate. We are spiritually diseased. Never have we had more to eat and found ourselves more famished. Never have we had more stuff and been less satisfied. It is time we made time for the timeless.
Psalm 46:10. Do you know what it says? “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10) Be still. Listen. Contemplate. Revel in. Meditate. Ruminate. We don’t reproduce what we want; we reproduce what we are. This world needs people who truly know God. I speak to you specifically as men. We need men of God, men of prayer, men who know the Word, men who reflect the character of God themselves. Let’s pray.