What Does the Lord Require?

6 “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? 7 Will the Lord 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 the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? -Micah 6:6-8

I came across these verses today and it was a good reminder of some of the great aspects of Christianity. Micah begins by asking what he should give the Lord in order to please him. He begins to list things that get increasingly ridiculous like "ten thousands of rivers of oil" and even his own body. However, he makes it clear that this is not what the Lord wants. God does not require us to make any tremendous physical sacrifices in order to please him because he already did that himself. Christ has already died in order to make us right in the eyes of God and he is the only one who could have done that.

So what do we have to do? Micah answers this in verse 8. He says to "do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." These are the things that God wants from us and I want to focus on the third one. Ii is interesting that he says that we need to "walk humbly with our God." I have found from experience that the best way to remain humble in my walk with God is to focus on God and compare myself to him instead of other people. Christ has given us the perfect standard by which to live. The first line of verse 8 says, "He has told you, O man, what is good. " God has told us what goodness is and Christ then came and lived it out. If we are always looking to Christ to measure how good we are doing we will always remain humble.

However, it is when we start comparing oursleves to other people that we start losing that humility. There are millions even billions of people in this world who can look at what Hitler did and then feel pretty proud about where they are at in their life. It is natural for us to compare ourselves to others to feel better about where we are at. But God knew this and that is why he was the one who lived the perfect life and made the sacrifice that none of us could. He wants us to look to him to see how good we are doing because when we start that we will begin practicing humility. Without that example none of us would realize where we are at and just how much we need God.