Do you find it easy to hear the voice of God? Weeks like this past week, I find it hard to hear the voice of God. I need some therapy so I just want to vent a little about why it’s been a tough week. I work in the IT field and lately I’ve had some computer server problems. Usually, I can solve issues in 1-2 days, but this particular problem is going in its 3rd week. And it’s killing me.
My personality is such that when I encounter a technical problem, I can’t let it go until I solve it. If the problem takes a bit longer than normal, it becomes an issue of man vs. machine and I’m not losing to a machine unless it is Big Blue with super quad processors am playing chess.
It’s a good trait to have as an IT person, but not good for my spiritual life. I realize I am like DOS with a pentium 386 processor and 256 MB of RAM. One problem at work and my capacity is maxed out. Everything else is put on hold.
On top of that, the last 3 days, the server that is running our main corporate website crashed with a hardware failure. So Jason and I have lived in a data center server room. For those of us here who are in the IT field, you know that a server room is the last place on earth you want to be. Imagine being stuck in a refrigerated wind tunnel and that’s what a server room is like.
So in recent months, whenever things like this happen at work, I have been praying, God, help me to solve this computer issue. I never thought I would have to pray about computer issues, but that what it has come to. Like Abraham jdsn preached last Sunday, Satan is always trying to trip us up, esp when we desire to do the will of God. When servers crash, I don’t blame Dell or HP. I blame Satan. Let’s blame all of our problems on him.
Do you find yourself maxed out by life? Long commutes, busy jobs, demanding kids – we don’t have enough space in our lives to hear the voice of God. We need to start by praying that God would protect us from Satan and all his tactics to distract us from what is best.
If we did manage to squeeze out some solitude, what might we hear God saying to us? Don’t you sometimes wish you could ask God, how do you want us to live? Lord, I want to do your will. I just can’t hear you. Please speak up.
Fortunately, God does speak. He lays some general guidelines throughout Scripture that applies to all believers. What does God require of us? I think one passage which outlines how we should be living is Micah 6:6-8. Let’s read that.
Micah is a book about judgment on God’s people, specifically, the leaders of Israel. Through this prophecy against them, the leaders are beginning to admit their wrong and repent. And they are like, how can we make up for all the past sins. Shall I give burnt offerings with year old calves? Okay, if that’s not good enough, shall I give 10,000 rams and 10,000 rivers of oil? Not enough? Okay, shall I give my firstborn son? That should be acceptable.
And God almost with a tone of sorrow mixed with incalculable love says, “This is what I require from you… just do what is right from now on, love my mercy and be merciful, and walk humbly with me.”
PART 1
I want to break down the 8th verse of Micah 6 and show through the example of David’s life, what a life of acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly w/ God looks like. To act justly. What does this mean? A simple definition of justice is to do what is right and good in the eyes of God. It is right to live a life of love rather than selfishness. It is right to live mercifully than harboring vengeance in our hearts. The emphasis of this verse is about doing, acting out of justice. In Hebrew, the word justice is misphat, which connotes actions and responsibilities towards others. There is a relational obligation.
Why is it important to act justly? It is not just a matter of right and wrong. Especially in the OT mindset, the Israelites were called to act justly to be a witness to the pagan nations. By showing kindness instead of selfishness, by showing mercy instead of being judgmental, the people of God were a living testimony to the ways of God.
But the question remains, what is the shape of our expression of justice to others?
In terms of acting justly or doing justice, I want to separate justice into 2 broad categories – personal justice and societal justice.
The verse doesn’t say seek out your personal justice. There is no mention of when you are wronged, you are entitled to make things right. The focus is on OUR acting justly, not on receiving justice for ourselves. You see the difference?
This is a very important principle in God’s economy that I am only just beginning to understand. Our personal justice is not something we should seek or demand as if it were our right.
King David clearly understood this. Before he was king, Saul was king. And Saul was an unjust, insecure, evil king who wanted to kill David because he felt threatened by him. Fearing for his life, David flees until one day he catches Saul offguard in a vulnerable position.
At that moment, David had a choice. He may have thought that it was his right to take out Saul. He could justify his murder of Saul in his mind and say he was acting in self-defense. He could rationalize that God was giving him the opportunity to administer justice by killing him?
But David refuses. He knows that personal justice is not something that he can take into his own hands. He trusts God and therefore simply cuts off the corner of his cloak to indicat
e that while he had the chance to kill Saul, he chose to spare him.
It’s important that we follow David’s example because if we go down this road of seeking out personal justice before God, then we’re asking for trouble.
Let me read Micah 7:9 – “Because I have sinned against him, I will bear the LORD’s wrath, until he pleads my case and establishes my right.”
Micah confesses that while speaking judgment against God’s people, because he is a sinner, he will bear whatever wrath God has in store for him. Until he pleads his case and establishes his right. We are sinners.
Therefore, if we ask for justice, then there is only condemnation and death. So we don’t want to seek out personal justice. If God does vindicate, then that is his prerogative. It’s God’s right alone to avenge His people and if he does, great. If he doesn’t, let’s not sit around waiting for our personal justice. Life is not about personal justice.
Micah was a prophet who spoke out against the societal injustice of his day.
Within the Israelite nation, the priests, judges and prophets were corrupt. There were laws which sanctioned prophets to stand above the judges and hold them accountable to God. Furthermore, the Elected priests were called to teach those with political power about God and His ways.
Over time, the prophets & priests became corrupt by the lure of comfort and power and they became mere puppets of the political system. This was the corruption that plagued Israel from within. And to make matters worse, Israel’s internal corruption was further compounded by the Assyrian takeover. This is the context from which Micah speaks.
The Assyrians were a ruthless people and typically when they conquered another nation, they would scatter the leaders of each conquered nation to minimize the treat of revolt.
And to keep the peace, Assyria would bribe the soldiers of the conquered nations to become traitors. Ironically, the conquered nations like Israel had to pay money regularly to their Assyrian oppressors to fund this army of traitors. Just imagine your good friend and neighbor who you just had over for dinner is now being employed by the Assyrians to be a soldier to oppress you. And you have to pay him out of your own pocket.
It is not right. This is socially unjust. And God raised up Micah to speak out against the injustice of his day and called the people to repentance.
For some of us, God may call us to speak out against societal injustice. Think of William Wilberforce. His calling was not only to act justly on a personal level but to speak out against the injustice of slavery at a societal level. God may call some of us to play that kind of role to speak out against some societal injustice. Who knows? In whatever capacity, we need to try with all of our hearts to act justly as a testimony of the goodness and fairness of God.
We’ve talked already about the Tijuana mission trip we had a couple of months ago and the lessons learned, but it really was an important spiritual marker for me.
I was blessed in one sense because we were participating in one small way in rolling back the social inequality in Tijuana. The contrast between the million dollar homes in San Diego and the shanty towns just across the border is so immense. Why do we live in such luxury while our brothers and sisters don’t even have clean water and enough food to eat. It’s unjust, it’s not right.
I was also blessed through this trip because it opened my eyes again to my spiritual poverty and convicted me that I’ve got to obey God in some way. I’ve got to do what’s right no matter my spiritual condition, no matter where I am at in life, or how wronged I feel. I have to do obey first and trust that God will change my heart in the process.
For the sake of our brothers and sisters abroad in Tijuana as well as those gathered in this room, we need to try our best to live justly toward one another, to do what is right before God by doing right to those around us, to be God’s witness to the world. We all could use a little justice in our lives.