March 13: Micah 6:6-8

Key Verse: Micah 6:8
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Devotion:
I don’t know if I would have been able to cope with the sacrifices and ways people were called to live by thousands of years ago – but God wanted people to stop and think about what they were doing and what the implications of their actions could be. If we were faced with death because of the small things we do wrong, then we may well stop doing those little things wrong and fall in line with the law!

But was it the sacrifices and burnt offerings God wanted – I fear not. I believe He was trying to make a point for us to see what we are doing wrong and the only way He could do that was to be quite extreme with His dealings with mankind! We face the same sort of things in our lives – when we fall out of line and start getting carried away with ourselves, the people around us may well take a drastic step to try and make us realise what we are doing wrong. Sometimes it takes that big step for us to wake up!

I wonder what it would have smelt like when a king like David was making a very large sacrifice of hundreds of animals to dedicate things to God. When I was in high school I was able to visit a slaughter house where animals were being killed for food and the smell of that took a few days to wear off – I kept thinking I smelt the blood and the burning of various things… When the kings of old performed large sacrifices, they would have been in the open and the smell would have permeated everything!

This is not what God requires. He does not require us to do all the sacrificing and carry on trying to show we are sorry through horrible acts like that. He wants to see the change in our hearts where we want to be good and we want to act justly, the love mercy (both to us and to others) and to walk humbly with Him. That means just getting on and doing the stuff He wants you to do and not shouting and boasting about it – a fine line we often step over in our lives nowadays.

Points to Ponder:
Do you act justly?

Will you live with mercy?