What God wants from us:

I like to listen to talk radio in the background while I’m driving or doing housework. Last month I was mopping a floor when conservative talk's Dennis Prager announced he was going to dedicate the next hour of his show to a single Bible verse that he thought succinctly summed up and gave the clearest picture of "what God wants from us."

Of course, I could hardly wait to hear what it was. It was Micah 6:8, taken from the NIV translation: “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.”

Prager, who describes himself as “a practicing Jew,” said his assessment was “virtues based” and that he doesn’t care if a person’s religious or not; he was looking at one's actions toward him and others. Prager argued that “if your religion does not make you a better person then it is worthless.” There was no mention made of his lack of belief in God’s Son. The Christian argument is, as Richard Jordan expresses it, "If your religion doesn't tell you where you're going to go when you die and spend eternity it ain't worth a dead horse."

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In reference to Micah 6:8, Jordan (shorewoodbiblechurch.org) reasons, “Pride is to have too big a view of your own importance and too little a view of God. The verse says, ‘And to walk humbly with thy God.’ Humility is the opposite attitude of pride. Humility is not saying, ‘I’m nothing, I’m worthless, I’m a worm.’ Humility is not being chopped liver, folks. That sense of, ‘I’m nothing, I’m a worm,’ that’s really—listen to me—that’s really self-pity and that’s just another form of pride. You hear that?

“Paul writes in Romans 12:3, ‘For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.’

“When he says over there in Acts 20, ‘Serving the Lord with all humility of mind,’ that’s Paul’s expression of what he writes in Ephesians 4 about walking in ‘lowliness and meekness.’ It’s understanding there’s a great God. He’s big; I’m not the issue. It’s understanding who I am in Him.

“I Corinthians 4:7 is a verse of Scripture that always strikes me when I think of humility: ‘For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’

“If you’ve got some God-given natural abilities or talent to do this or that or the next thing, where’d you get that? Well, you got it because of who God made you.

“When you read the part, ‘Now if thou didst receive it, why does thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?’ do you understand what that’s saying? That doesn’t take a fifth-year student in Greek to exegete that.

“ ‘God made me and I belong to Him, and every good thing I have is a gift from the Almighty, so I just need to do the best with what God gave me and I’m not going to act like He didn’t give it to me and I did it myself.’

“That verse says, ‘You know, you shouldn’t get all puffed up about something you’re good at it because who is it that made you good at it? That’s humility of mind, and I’m not just talking about believing, I’m talking about life in general.

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“When you realize who God is and who you are in relationship to Him, you walk in that light. That’s what the verse says God required. That’s the good He’s seeking.

“Now, you know the problem with that, right? We fall short, don’t we? But those three words—justice, mercy and humility—describe the heart God wants because God wants the real you.

“Did you ever learn the poem, ‘What shall I give Him, poor as I am. If I were a shepherd, I’d give Him a lamb. If I were a wise man, I’d do my part. But what shall I give Him? I’ll give Him my heart.’ That’s what God desires.

“You say, ‘How do I give Him my heart?’ Paul says, ‘With a heart man believes unto righteousness.’ Do you live that way on a daily basis, or does living for the Lord just become, ‘Well, that’s what we do.’

"You ever tell your kids that? You know, the kids are growing up and they ask, ‘Uh, why we got to go to church?’ and you answer, ‘That’s what we do—that’s who we are.’

“I know with me, three or four times a day, I have to stop and look myself in the eye of my heart and ask, ‘Ricky, what are you doing and why are you doing it?’ And if isn’t coming out of my heart, see, I need to make an adjustment. I might not need to change what I’m doing . . .

“Was it good for Israel to give the best they had? Yes. Was it good for them to give in great exuberance and quantity? Yes. Then why wasn’t that enough? Because it didn’t come out of a heart of faith. It didn’t come out of a heart that reflected His life—His justice, His mercy, His attitude.”