Sermon –What is Required Sept. 11, 2005

Intro
God has been blessing me over the last few weeks with the beauty and the simplicity of the gospel. I often over-complicate the Christian life. I wrestle with God’s will. I agonize over difficult Bible passages. I vacillate on my commitment. The Lord put a straightforward and simple verse under my nose. He brought it to me on multiple occasions and in various ways so I know I’m supposed to talk about it today. Here it is:

Micah 6:8
He has showed you, O man, 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.

Three things are required for a successful Christian life and here they are:

Act Justly
Love Mercy
Walk Humbly with God

Let’s go through them one at a time.

Act Justly
To act justly is to treat others with fairness and integrity. It seems there are two standards for justice today. The first, and by far the most popular, is comparing my actions to what others would do. How the average person behaves becomes my guide. If the average person would fudge a little on their income taxes, then it is okay for me. If the average person fails to disclose a problem with a car they are selling then it must be okay for me also. If most others speed when they are running late, then I can, too.

The second standard is WWJD. What would Jesus do? What would He want me to do? To use the second standard we must be very confident God will honor our just acts. By nature we are self-preservationists. We look out for ourselves. If it will help me to tell a white lie, then I tell it. God is asking us to overcome our self-preservation instinct and trust Him to cover our backside. Act justly even if it does not benefit me and trust God to see and reward in His time.

When I owned a business several years ago we were printing paychecks for hundreds of employees each week. At the end of the month the accounting department would find errors in the prior checks. Usually it was only a few cents or dollars. My dilemma was, do we admit these errors or just keep going. We could admit them and return underpayments to employees and vendors but we would never get money back if the mistake went the other way. So was it best to ignore the mistakes and assume the pluses would eventually equal the minuses? We could adopt the standard of our competitors. I was active in the trade leadership of our industry and I knew most other companies never corrected costly mistakes unless someone else caught it. But I believed in the second standard; that God honored justice and He would somehow make us whole even when we returned all mistakes in favor of others but ate the mistakes made against us.

To act justly in every life circumstance is difficult yet it is to be our goal.

Love Mercy
The next requirement listed in Micah 6:8 is to love mercy. In the Old Testament this word is checed. It is pronounced kheh'-sed and I remember it well because it was on every exam given by my Old Testament History and Theology professor. He never missed an opportunity to say it in class and spray the front row with spit on the khec sound. He taught us it was the most important word in the Old Testament because it was a running theme that demonstrated God’s mercy down through history. He was so right. Without mercy every one of us in this room would be dead ducks; we would be cursed for eternity. God’s mercy is the most important reality of our lives.

We are to love mercy in two ways. First we are to love the mercy shown to us. We have talked about the degree of our sin in previous sermons. You may recall I said, “Take heart you are a bigger sinner than you thought.” Sin is not just the Ten Commandments of idolatry, using God’s name cheaply (as we talked about last week), honoring mother and father, murder, adultery, stealing, lying, coveting; no - sin is any impure thought or word. It is any kindness or grace left undone. I don’t know about you but by this standard I am a sinner through and through.

I am like the old man who prayed, “Lord, here I am your faithful servant. I am trying hard not to sin today. I haven’t been unkind, I haven’t coveted, and I haven’t lied. But then, I haven’t gotten out of bed yet.”

My sin is no small thing; but God’s grace is not small either.

Mic 7:18-20
18 Who is a God like you,
who pardons sin and forgives the transgression
of the remnant of his inheritance?
You do not stay angry forever
but delight to show mercy.
19 You will again have compassion on us;
you will tread our sins underfoot
and hurl all our iniquities into the depths of the sea.
20 You will be true to Jacob,
and show mercy to Abraham,
as you pledged on oath to our fathers
in days long ago.

Don’t you love God’s mercy? But the other part of loving mercy is to show mercy to others. How small of us to accept God’s mercy and then fail to extend mercy to others. Jesus was particularly hard on those who used a double standard regarding mercy: one for themselves and another for others. Recall the parable of the forgiven servant who would not forgive his fellow. We studied that a few weeks back when we used the scales of forgiveness. Jesus was very clear on this subject. He said:

Matt 6:14-15
14 For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

He who burns the bridge of mercy destroys the very bridge he himself must walk over if he is to reach God.

So why are we so slow to pardon others? It is because once we have acted justly as we talked about, it seems unfair that others should be allowed to be unjust. The gap in that logic is no one ever acts unjustly and goes unnoticed. God sees all. God is keeping track. That is His job. It is not ours. We are not the judge or even the accountant. The one who loves mercy will hate sin, and the effects of sin, even the clothing stained by corrupted flesh, as Jude puts it. But the lover of mercy will busy himself with begging mercy for the sinner and leaving God to the task of deciding who gets punished and how much.

One of the reasons the church of Jesus is not much larger and well attended is because we have not loved mercy toward others. When a street person, or drug addict, or prostitute, or a gay comes into our circle, we shrink. “Eeeuw, that person is involved in heinous sin. I can’t condone that behavior by talking to them.” We need to love on sinners and demonstrate God’s mercy to them.

I heard of a church where the pastor invited a gang of bikers to attend. When the church ladies heard about it they approached the pastor and asked him where he intended the bikers to sit. The pastor said, “Well, I guess we’ll have to ask them to sit between the gossipers, the busybodies, and the bigots.”

May we commit together to love mercy and leave the judging to God.

Walk Humbly With God
Boy do I fall down a lot here; both on the walking with God part and the humility part. God has gently but firmly prodded me on this one. Here are a couple of passages I must frequently pray into my life:

1 Cor 4:7
For who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?

John 3:21
But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God.

Every last drop of goodness you see in me, any progress in God’s kingdom, has been done through God. Any weakness or inadequacy you see in me is strictly mine. I can lay claim to all the pathetic failures.

One more passage comes to mind on the subject of humility:

Matt 18:3-4
I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.

In light of Christ’s strong words I went to my two-year old grandson for advice on being childlike. I caught up with Jaden as he finished breakfast in his highchair. When asked about his future plans he replied by banging a spoon on his bowl for enjoyment of the ceramic ringing sound. Clearly this child was absorbed in the present moment and not worried about the future. Oh that I might be so trusting of my Father’s watch-care that I would relax into the present.

I asked Jaden what his joys were. The cherub cheeks puckered up as he said, “egem.” His mother interpreted this effusion as “eggs.” He loves eggs. Information from other sources revealed that Jaden also enjoys playing with trucks, balls, and loves his bath. Whatever simple joys are available are what he indulges in. This insight cuts a sharp contrast to the schemes I develop for ever increasing material possessions and pleasures.

I asked Jaden to list his accomplishments. The only reply was, “Uh-oh.” I believe the response was more reflective of his immediate challenge with eggs on his spoon then it was of chagrin for not having founded a charity, led a cause, or gained international acclaim. To cover Jaden’s modesty his mother rattled off a list: walking, sleeping all night, eating solid foods, a 250 word vocabulary. When I compared Jaden’s list to mine, the one accomplishment where he had an edge was in humbly accepting the love that surrounded him. According to what we just read from Jesus, this is the accomplishment that matters.

Simple But Hard
The Christian life really is a simple matter. It is simple, but hard. Simple enough a child can excel and come in first. But it is hard for a corrupted, unforgiving, self-sufficient adult like me to practice. Thank God even here we are not left to our own devices. God has given us the Holy Spirit to make it possible for us to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly.

Gal 5:16
So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.

I submit to you it is impossible to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly unless we are living in the strength of the Spirit. Toward that end, let’s commit here and now that every day we will call on the Holy Spirit to aid us in these three simple requirements.


Prayer