What God Has Always Wanted From You

(Micah 6:6-8)

Have you ever worried that you could never bring enough?

That is how the people felt in the days of the prophet Micah. They wanted God to be happy with them. So they began to ask what they could carry up the hill to him.

"Should I bring a lamb?" they said. "A young one, the very best in the flock?"

And then, because their hearts were anxious, they began to pile it higher.

"A thousand rams! Rivers and rivers of oil! Would that be enough? Would that finally be enough?"

You can almost hear them counting and stacking, hoping the heap would grow tall enough to reach heaven.

Then they whispered the most terrible question of all. "Should I bring my own child? My firstborn? Should I give up the one I love most, to pay for the wrong I have done?"

Long before, when Abraham climbed a mountain with his boy Isaac, God had stopped his hand and provided the offering himself. But the people had forgotten. Their piles did not please God at all. They grieved him. Because they thought he was the kind of god you had to buy. They thought his love was for sale, and they were always, always short.

So God told them, gently, what he had wanted from the very beginning. And it was not a heap at all.

He has shown you, dear one, what is good.

Three small things. You can almost hold them in two hands.

Do what is right. (Be fair. Be kind to the ones nobody else is kind to.)

Love mercy. (Long to forgive the way you long for a warm meal when you are hungry.)

And walk humbly with your God. (Walk close. Hand in hand. Like a small child beside someone big and safe.)

That was all. Instead of a mountain of lambs, a walk. God never wanted their stuff. He wanted them.

But nobody could walk it. Nobody managed even one single day of being perfectly fair and perfectly kind and perfectly close. They tried, and they tripped. Their feet kept wandering off the path, so they kept bringing more lambs.

And the longing stayed open, like a door left ajar, waiting for a Man who could walk it.

One day, far down the years, he came. He was born in Bethlehem, the little town Micah had sung about. He did what was right, every single hour. He loved mercy so much he went looking for the people nobody wanted. And he walked humbly with his God, close as breathing, never once letting go of his Father's hand.

He walked the whole path, the very path you and I keep stumbling off.

And then he held out his hand to you.

Not so you could pay him back, but so that, holding on to him, you could walk it too. Right beside him. All the way home.

You do not have to carry a heap up the hill. You only have to take his hand.