Introduction
We return, this evening, to the Book of Micah, and we come tonight to Micah 6:1-8.
And this is, I think, a very providential text for us tonight. And before I read it, I want to spend a few minutes explaining just why I think that is.
I didn’t aim to preach from this text tonight. I originally planned to get to it on a different Sunday evening. And then because of some things out of my control, it got moved to last Sunday. And then when I was out last Sunday, it got moved to tonight. All of which is to say, coming to this text tonight was not my intention.
But Friday morning, as I worked on this sermon, I was suddenly struck by how fitting this particular text is for those of us who are gathered here tonight.
This passage, as I’ll argue in a few minutes, is aimed particularly at the more overtly religiously active among God’s people … it is tuned towards the sort of temptations that face those who are especially observant and devout in their faith.
And that, brothers and sisters, is us. It’s those of us who are here tonight.
Because first of all, we are Americans in Western Washington, who go to church. According to the Pew Research Center, if you attend church more than twice a month, that already makes you more religiously observant than 75% of adults in our region.
But it’s not just that. Because most of you are not here for the first time this Sunday. You’re here for the second time. Where most observant evangelical Christians today attend church once on Sunday, you are among the minority that attend it twice – both Sunday morning and Sunday evening.
But it doesn’t stop there either. Because if you are here tonight, then you are among the even smaller minority, who have chosen to attend Sunday evening worship on Super Bowl Sunday – one of the high feast days of our secular culture.
Friends, if we want to zero in on the especially religiously observant … here we are! It’s us.
Now, some of you will object.
Some of you might be thinking that that’s not you, because as you see it, somebody dragged you here tonight – you didn’t want to come. Maybe you’re even secretly tracking the score on your smartphone right now. (If you are, please don’t tell me the score, I’m trying to watch it tomorrow, without finding out who won beforehand.) If that’s you, then maybe you’re not exactly who I’m talking about … but you’re at least pretty closely connected to them … so don’t assume this category I’m speaking about doesn’t at least partially overlap with you.
Others will respond that you don’t like football … or you didn’t even know today was the Super Bowl. But that just proves my point. The Super Bowl isn’t just about football. It is a secular cultural event. It is a significant day in our culture. And if you are more tuned in to the events going on here today than to the events like that going on in our culture, then you are among the especially devout.
Still others of you … know that I’m talking about you. You know what today is. And to some degree, you knew what it meant to be seen here tonight. Maybe you even came in and noticed there were fewer people than normal … and maybe you thought to yourself “Wow … what a shame that not as many people are here tonight …” And then, maybe a tiny voice in the back of your mind whispered “But I’m here …” Maybe you even caught yourself praying a little prayer. Something like: “God, I thank you that I am not like other men, those who neglect the gathering of your church, those who don’t value your Sabbath, or even like those home watching TV tonight. I come here twice a week, and devote to you every Sunday that I get.” [See Luke 18:9-14]
Have any thoughts like that passed through your mind tonight? If so, then our text tonight is especially for you.
Now, don’t hear what I’m not saying. I’m not saying it would have been better for you to be at a Super Bowl party tonight. I’m not saying that I assume that if you are here then you are a Pharisee. I’m not doubting that real faithfulness may have been the driving motivation for most or even all of you in coming tonight. I’m not scolding you for your devotion! So don’t hear what I’m not saying.
What I am saying is that if you are here tonight, unless someone else really dragged you here, then the devil’s most effective strategy in tempting you to sin is probably not to tempt you towards irreligion. It’s probably to try to tempt you towards false religion. It’s probably to try to tempt you towards prideful religion. It’s probably to try to tempt you towards forms of sin that can be easily mistaken (maybe even by you) for devotion. What I’m saying is that that is probably the best way to go after most of us gathered here tonight.
And God, in his providence, has given us a text tonight that focuses on just that form of temptation. And so we should be all ears tonight – every one of us.
So let’s come at our text honestly tonight. Let’s be honest with ourselves. Let’s be honest with the Lord. It’s just us and the Lord here. The world around us isn’t paying attention. They’re busy watching football and really expensive commercials. So let’s not worry about them tonight. Let’s worry about us and what the Lord has to say to us, through his prophet, Micah, and his Son, Jesus Christ.
The Reading of the Word
With all that said, let’s hear now from our text: Micah 6:1-8.
Please do listen carefully, this is God’s word for us this evening.
6:1 Hear what Yahweh says:
Arise, plead your case before the mountains,
and let the hills hear your voice.
2 Hear, you mountains, the indictment of Yahweh,
and you enduring foundations of the earth,
for Yahweh has an indictment against his people,
and he will contend with Israel.
3 “O my people, what have I done to you?
How have I wearied you? Answer me!
4 For I brought you up from the land of Egypt
and redeemed you from the house of slavery,
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
5 O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised,
and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the righteous acts of Yahweh.”
6 “With what shall I come before Yahweh,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will Yahweh be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does Yahweh require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
This is the word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God.)
The Trajectory of Our Text
Along with Bruce Waltke, David Jones has been a major guide for me as I have considered our passage. Dr. Jones was a professor at Covenant Seminary for forty years. The year I took ethics, the seminary was between professors for the class, and Dr. Jones came back from retirement to teach us. And in his book, Biblical Christian Ethics, Dr. Jones deals with our passage tonight – particularly verse eight.
And as he does, he links it to the words of Jesus in Matthew 23. In Matthew 23, Jesus is pronouncing woes upon the scribes and Pharisees as hypocritical religious leaders – he is criticizing them as having the outward signs of religion, for being known for their devotion, but for having a false devotion – a false religion.
We have to remember that this may have been shocking in Jesus’s day. We may come in assuming the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees, but in Jesus’s day, they were viewed as those who were especially devout – as those who stood firmly against the cultural compromise of so many other Jews, and the paganism of the Romans.
But Jesus saw that while some around him were tempted towards sin in the form of irreligion, the scribes and Pharisees had their own temptations. They were tempted towards a form of false religion. And he describes that false religion as having the outward signs of religion, while their hearts were far from God.
And so, in Matthew 23:23 he says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
Jesus identifies the “weightier matters of the law” as “justice and mercy and faithfulness.” But David Jones points out, Jesus did not pull these three items out of nowhere. They come up repeatedly in the Hebrew prophets – including in our text this evening:
8 He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does Yahweh require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness [or mercy],
and to walk humbly with your God? [Jones, 77-79]
And the parallels extend to the overall shape of our passage tonight as well. In other words, Jesus seems to be doing much the same thing in Matthew 23:23 as Micah was doing here in Micah 6:1-8.
So, in some ways tonight I want to take these two passages together. And as we do, we will see three things in our text tonight: We see God’s claim on us, we see how we try to bargain with God, and we see what God actually requires of us.
God’s Claim on Us
So, first, we see God’s claim on us. We see that in verses one through five.
In the first two verses of our text, the scene is set. And the scene that the Lord sets is that of a trial. Yahweh is the plaintiff. Micah is the messenger on behalf of the plaintiff. The mountains are called in as witnesses. And Israel is the defendant. And God then calls on Micah to arise and present his case.
And as God sets out his case, what is the first thing he seeks to establish? It is his claim on his people. He says:
3 “O my people, what have I done to you?
How have I wearied you? Answer me!
4 For I brought you up from the land of Egypt
and redeemed you from the house of slavery,
and I sent before you Moses,
Aaron, and Miriam.
5 O my people, remember what Balak king of Moab devised,
and what Balaam the son of Beor answered him,
and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the righteous acts of Yahweh.”
What is the Lord’s point here?
He begins by reminding them that he has redeemed them. Which means that they belong to him. They had been slaves in Egypt, but Yahweh redeemed them. But he didn’t redeem them just to release them to go off on their own! He redeemed them in order to make them his. Yahweh took them from being Pharoah’s people in order to make them his own people. Where Pharoah treated them as slaves, Yahweh would make them sons. Where Pharoah reigned over them in a way that would impart death, Yahweh would reign over them in a way that would impart life. So much changed as they went from being under Pharoah to being under Yahweh. But they still belonged to someone. They belonged to Yahweh. He redeemed them, and they were his.
Here he reminds them of that. He reminds them of how he delivered them. He reminds them of their enemies that he defeated for them in the wilderness.
Here Micah essentially says to Israel the same thing that the Apostle Paul says to us in First Corinthians 6, when he tells the church: “You are not your own, for you were bought with a price.” Paul reminds them that Christ had purchased them with his blood, and they now belonged to him. In the same way, Micah here reminds Israel that they belong to Yahweh.
They don’t just owe God some part of their lives. They don’t just owe him their hearts, or their Sabbaths, or their tithes … they owe him everything. Every part of their lives is rightfully his. They are his. His claim on them is total. That is what it means to be God’s people – those he has redeemed, those he has purchased for himself. And Micah reminds the people of this in verses three through five.
How We Try to Bargain with God
How, then, do the people respond?
Well, we see that in verses six and seven. There we see a picture of how we often try to bargain with God.
In these verses we have the words of a representative Israelite worshipper. How does this worshiper respond to God’s claim on him in verses three through five? He says:
6 “With what shall I come before Yahweh,
and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will Yahweh be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?”
What is this representative Israelite worshipper saying here?
Commentator Bruce Waltke puts it well. He writes: “In a series of parallel lines, each beginning with a question, a representative ‘worshipper’ seeks to establish the price that will win God’s favour by raising the bid ever higher.” First, he offers burnt offerings. Then one-year-old calves, which are more costly. Then thousands of rams. Then ten thousand rivers of oil! Finally, he even offers to sacrifice his own child. Waltke writes: “Outwardly, he appears spiritual as he bows before the Most High with gift in hand. But his insulting questions betray a desperately wicked heart. […] [He suggests] that God, like man, can be bought. His willingness to raise the price does not reflect his generosity but veils a complaint that God demands too much; the reverse side of his bargaining is that he hopes to buy God off as cheaply as possible. What effrontery to such a mighty and gracious God!” [Waltke, 213]
And that is the same pattern we see in Matthew 23. There Jesus says: “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness. These you ought to have done, without neglecting the others.”
In both cases what we see is false religiosity – religious devotion that appears to be giving more to God than others are, but which is actually a way of trying to give God less than he is entitled to.
The scribes and Pharisees were diligent with tithing everything they received – not just the crops of their fields, but even from the tiny herbs that grew in their herb gardens. Now, Jesus is clear that he doesn’t disparage this practice in itself. His critique is for the pattern that it is a part of. It is a pattern of carrying out certain acts of religious observance that seem very devout, but that are done in a way that coincides with, and maybe even enables, a neglect of God’s more significant claims on them. And Jesus points them instead to the weightier demands of the law, pointing them back, in a sense, to our passage here in Micah.
It was a pattern of temptation for God’s people in Micah’s day. It was a pattern of temptation for God’s people in Jesus’ day. And it is a pattern of temptation for God’s people in our day as well.
It makes me think of some of the recent scandals in the evangelical world. A lot of people listened to the recent podcast series about Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill … or they read the articles in Christianity Today about the sins of Ravi Zacharias … and they marveled at how these men could be doing so much ministry, so much good work in people’s lives, while at the same time engaging in obvious and heinous sin in other areas of their lives.
You know, as I thought about these patterns this week … I actually don’t find them that perplexing. I find them pretty understandable, in a way.
Now, don’t misunderstand me. By saying that, I am not saying that they are excusable. I’m not minimizing the serious harm they have done in the lives of others. I’m not downplaying how contrary to the gospel they are.
What I am saying is that the pattern of thought that got them there, is, I think, understandable. Meaning that we, fallen people – even fallen Christians – should recognize that sinful pattern of thought as not so far from most of us. Sure, these individuals embraced it in especially severe ways. But the pattern itself is quite common – at least it is to my own sinful thoughts and temptations.
When I am tempted to sin and selfishness, I hear that line of reasoning in my head. “Look how much I’ve already given to God. I mean, I work for him full time. I write sermons. I try to help people. I try to lead the church. Think how many hours I put in for God this week. Look at my thousands of rams. Look at my ten of thousand rivers of oil! So after all that … can’t I have this little part of my life for myself? For what I want? To fulfill my sinful desires? Haven’t I paid God enough already? Surely, I’ve hit the minimum payment that he can reasonably require, and these other parts of my life, I can do what I want with … right?”
I think it’s a common form of temptation for those in full-time ministry. But it’s also not limited to those in full-time ministry. Not at all.
You can be tempted to it too. “Look at all the money I’ve already given to God,” you might say. Or “Look at all the time I’ve given to God.” Or “Look at how faithful or how sacrificial I’ve been in this or that area of my life.” “Look at how often I come to church.” “Look at all these people whom I’ve helped.” “Look at my thousands of rams.” “Look at my ten thousand rivers of oil.” “Surely I’ve hit the minimum payment God can reasonable require of me. … And so surely, I can have this one thing, this area of life, this tiny idol, this sinful pleasure – surely, I can have this for myself. … surely I’ve earned it.”
That is the temptation of the especially religious. It’s the temptation of the scribe and the Pharisee. It’s the temptation of those who are known for being especially devout. It’s the temptation of those who show up for evening church on Super Bowl Sunday.
Now, again, don’t mishear me. I do not presume that you are controlled by this pattern of sin as the Israelites around Micah were or the scribes and Pharisees around Jesus were. But I do assume that this pattern of sin will at least be a temptation for you. After all, if you are a fallen human being, how could it not be? None of us are exempt from temptation in this life.
So take a moment, and think about your own heart and life. And ask yourself: Do you see a temptation to this pattern of thinking? Do you see areas where it calls to you? Areas where you maybe give in to it?
What, for you, are the great offerings that come to mind that prove your devotion, and prove that you have done enough? What are the thousands of rams or the ten thousand rivers of oil that you are tempted to claim for yourself, as what you have already given to God or to his people?
And what are the areas of life that you then try to exempt from devotion to God? What are the things you try to keep for yourself? What are the idols you try to preserve? What are the sinful pleasures you feel you have a right to, after all you’ve already done – all you’ve already given?
And do you see the wickedness of that pattern of thought? Do you see the evil of that temptation? Do you see how it tries to buy God off? How it tries to bargain with him? How it is a fundamental denial of God’s true claim on us – a denial of the gospel truth that you are not your own, for you were bought with a price, and now you belong, wholly, and completely, to Jesus?
After all, Jesus has given himself fully for you. It is only right that you now owe your full self to him.
That might sound drastic. But it is right. And it is not just right – it is also love.
Love does not bargain. Love does not negotiate. Love gives of itself. Christ has given himself to us completely, in love. And now we are called to give ourselves to him completely, in love.
Jesus reminds us of this when he sums up the greatest commandments. “The most important,” commandment, he said, “is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” [Mark 12:29-31] For “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” [Matthew 22:40]
God has loved us. And in response we are called to love him with all of ourselves, and to love those he has placed around us as ourselves.
But what does that look like?
Well, we get something of an answer in verse eight.
What God Requires of Us
The call to love can be difficult to parse out at times. We can be tempted to a vague way of thinking about it. And so, God gives us not just the command to love, but all the details of his law – from the ten commandments on – to flesh out what this kind of love is supposed to look like.
And, as David Jones points out, one of the ways God elaborates on what love of God and neighbor is to look like, is with the call to the triad of justice, mercy, and faithfulness. [Jones, 77-79]
Those are the “weightier matters of the law” that Jesus identifies in Matthew 23. And they are also what God calls his people to in Micah 6:8.
There we read:
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does Yahweh require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
To Do Justice
The first way that God calls us to devote ourselves to him here is “to do justice”.
The Hebrew word is mishpat. And the concept is to render to each person what is due to them.
Now, we have talked at length in this sermon series about what that might look like on a societal level. But let’s consider tonight what that means on an individual level.
What does it mean for us to render to each person what is due to them – what we owe them?
Again, we have to be careful, because it is so easy for us to swerve into humanistic ways of thinking. When we talk about what we owe other people, some of us fall into thinking in libertarian terms – we think strictly about avoiding doing unjust harm to others, and then we leave it there. Others of us fall into more transactional ways of thinking – we think of relationships as social contracts, as mutually beneficial arrangements where we owe certain things to people in exchange for the good that they do for us. And still others of us tend to think of things only in abstracted systemic terms – we want some system which we contribute to in some way, and then we have done justice.
But that is not the biblical picture of justice. The biblical picture of justice is that we give to each person what we owe to them … and it is God who determines what we owe them. [Jones, 79-80]
It’s not an atomistic system in which our main calling is to leave other people alone. It’s not a social contract system where we only give to other people what we have committed to give to them. It’s not a system where we can write a check and consider our work done.
To do justice, as the Bible defines it, is for us to render to those in our lives what God says we owe them.
Neither you nor society get to decide what you owe your spouse. God does. Neither you nor your culture get to decide what you owe to your parents or to your children. God does. Neither you nor your church leadership gets to determine what you owe your brothers and sisters in Christ, God does. Neither you nor the state has the final word on what you owe your neighbor, God does. And rendering to each what God says you owe them, is to do justice.
Think of this with your spouse. The Apostle Paul tells us that husbands and wives owe love and respect to one another. [Ephesians 5:33] He teaches that each is to love the other with the sacrificial love of Jesus. [Ephesians 5:25, 1 Corinthians 11:3]. That is what you owe your spouse. That is what it is to do justice to your spouse.
Notice, that what you owe them is not determined by what they have done for you. Notice that what you owe them is not determined by a set of details you agreed to at some point in the past. Notice that what you owe is not determined by what is mutually beneficial, or how you feel about them today. Notice it cannot be negotiated along the way – we cannot get out of some obligations by pointing to others.
And yet, this is what we so often are tempted to do. Much as we discussed a moment ago with God, in our other relationships – including in our marriages – we often point to one thing we did to try to excuse us of another. We think things like “look at the sacrifice I have made for my family, in working a job I don’t like so I can provide for them,” or “look at the sacrifice I have made for my family by leaving a career I did like so I could care for them.” We say “look at the provision I have supplied” or “look at the service I’ve rendered” or “look at this or that thing that I have done” … “therefore I don’t also have to give my spouse my affection” … or “my respect” … or “my encouragement” … or “my heart” … or “words of affirmation” … or “acts of physical intimacy” … or any number of other things. “Look at the thousands of rams. Look at the rivers of oil. I don’t owe them more.”
But we do not determine what we owe to others. God does. And God calls us to love our spouse with the love of Jesus. And Jesus does not try to bargain with his love.
Now, of course, there are sins severe enough that they can break the marriage covenant, that they can even sever these obligations – that’s not what we’re talking about here. But ordinarily, these are the obligations you have to your spouse – this is what it means to do justice in that relationship.
In a similar way, the Bible tells us that we owe obedience to our parents when we are children, we owe care to them in their old age, and we owe honor to them at all stages of our lives. That is what it means to do justice.
So too, we owe love, and nurture, guidance, and discipline to our children in their childhood, and loving care for them in their adulthood.
We owe to our fellow Christians the familial love required as fellow members of the household of God: to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, younger women as sisters – to honor and care for them all in love and purity.
And to those around us – to our neighbors, whether Christian or not, whether religious or not, whether our cultural allies or not, whether they love us or not, what do we owe them? We are to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is what it means to do justice.
We try to skirt these obligations in many ways. We try to redefine what we owe to other people. But neither we nor society has the right to determine what we owe. We are not our own. We are not society’s. We are God’s. And he tells us what we owe others.
And to do that is to do justice.
That is the first thing the Lord has required of us.
To Love Mercy
Next, we read in verse eight that the second way the Lord calls on us to devote ourselves to him is to “love kindness.”
The Hebrew here is hesed, and it is also frequently translated as “mercy” – which may give us an even better window to what is in view here.
Because love goes beyond just what we owe. Love cannot be summed up in the calling to do justice. Love also delights in showing mercy … in showing grace … in going beyond what is owed.
That includes forgiving others when they sin against us, and showing kindness beyond what is expected of us. David Jones writes: “In contrast to [mishpat – justice] which may be demanded as a matter of right, hesed in all its forms (mercy, kindness, goodness) is free and often amazing.
Hesed … mercy, or grace … delivers others from trouble, it forgives sins, it shows kindness even when it is not owed.
As Francis Anderson explains, hesed is love that goes beyond custom or what is prescribed. Hesed goes beyond what is expected or what is one’s obligation. Hesed is surprising and unusual. Hesed is an act of good when no one would have blamed us if we hadn’t done it. [Jones, 89]
Hesed is the love that God has shown to his people. And on that basis, he calls us to show it to others – to love others as Christ has loved us.
To devote ourselves to God as he has called us to, is to not only do justice, but to love to show God’s hesed – his mercy, his kindness, his goodness beyond what is expected – to other people. [Jones, 86-92]
That is the second thing that the Lord requires of us.
To Walk Humbly with Your God
Finally, the third way we are called to devote ourselves to the Lord in verse eight is “to walk humbly with your God.”
This corresponds to the call to “faithfulness” in Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 23. And while the Hebrew word for faithfulness does not appear here, the concept certainly does – with the focus being on our faithfulness to God himself.
The third way we are to devote ourselves to the Lord is to walk humbly with him, for he is our God.
Here the emphasis in Micah shifts from our relationship with other people, to our relationship with God himself. And we are reminded that what God requires of us – the weightier thing he asks of us – is not just a set of good works … it’s not just a checklist of obligations … but it is to walk with him in humility and faithfulness. It is to relate to him in a real relationship. It is to live our lives before him. To seek to know him in love and in truth. It is to relate to God not in a distant or in a contractual way … but to walk with him in love and humility. It is to go about our acts of devotion not as a means of keeping God off our backs … but as a means of truly knowing him … of walking with him.
It is to pray, to read the Scriptures, to worship, to live faithfully, to come here in the evening on Super Bowl Sunday … because we want to know him, and walk with him, in love and humility.
That is what God requires of us. That is what he calls us to: to do justice, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with him.
“O My People”
If we consider God’s claim on us … if we consider the ways we are prone to and tempted to try to buy God’s favor and thus excuse ourselves from the weightier matters of the law … if we consider the call God places on us to love him and to love those around us by doing justice, by loving mercy, and by walking in humble faithfulness with God … then we will see many ways that we fall short.
And if you feel that way tonight, then once again, this text is for you.
We said, at the beginning, that God is calling his people to court. He is bringing a legal complaint before them. But the aim of his legal confrontation with Israel is not to sentence them to punishment. It is not to end his relationship with them on account of their failures. The aim of his legal confrontation is rather to restore his covenant relationship with his people. [Waltke, 210]
Listen to how God addresses Israel. “O my people” he says in verse three. “O my people” he says in verse five. God has not disowned them. He has not rejected them. Rather, he longs for them. He has loved them, and he longs for them to turn to him in love. He is not seeking to dissolve his covenant with them. But he is seeking to restore it. [Waltke, 212]
And so if the Lord has brought conviction to you tonight, hear it for what it is. It is a call to repent – to turn away from false religion. But it is a call towards God himself. It is a call to return to him. It is a call to know him afresh. It is a call to be restored to a real and loving relationship with him.
He has already done so much for you. Even when you were dead in your sin, he sent his Son to die for you. How can you doubt then, that if you turn to him now, he will receive you again?
He has proved his love for you. Turn back to him again tonight, to receive his love, and to offer him yours.
Amen.
—
This sermon draws on material from:
Aucker, W. Brian and Dennis R. Magary. Introduction and notes to Micah in The ESV Study Bible. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008.
Jones, David Clyde. Biblical Christian Ethics. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1994.
Pew Research Center. “Religious Landscape Study: Adults in the Seattle Metro Area.” 2014. https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/metro-area/seattle-metro-area/
Waltke, Bruce K. “Micah: An Introduction and Commentary” in Obadiah, Jonah and Micah. Tyndale Old Testament Commentaries. Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1988.
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