[Thursday's Devotional] - Act, love and walk

For a long time one of my favourite verses has been Micah 6:8:

 

“To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”.

 

This verse is a life changing verse, but recently I was struck by a challenge I had missed in the verse, partly because it is so obvious, I kind of took it as a given, when in reality, for me I know it is not.  I realised it is one thing to strive that my actions be just, but if I never strive to act, this is simple and will simply have no effect.  It is fine to value mercy but if I never love anything more than myself, I will never love with mercy.  And I can strive to have a heart of humility, but if I don’t actively walk with God, I will humbly drift to wherever the world takes me and my humility will be for nothing.  

 

When I thought on this more I realised this is connected to a real worry in the modern church, our ability to turn everything into a bible study or a heart attitude, when if we are honest, we could all stand, to take a stand, and act on God’s word.  Francis Chan compares this to the children’s game “Simon Says”, but he says we play “God says”, we don’t actually do it, we just remember what he said in our heart, or think about what it would like if we did it, or memorise the Greek word for doing what he says.  

 

The reason this has stuck with me so much is because my heart shamefully knows this to be true for me far too often.  So as I read this verse recently I was challenged, humility, justice, and mercy are some of the most beautiful and powerful attitudes and values we can have, but if we never walk, if we never act, if we never love it is all for nothing.

 

I want to be Just, but I want it to be evident by my life acting out God’s plan for me rather than my answer in a bible study.
I want to be humble, but I want it to be evidenced by the way I walk in God’s shadow yearning to stay close but never obscuring people from seeing him.  I want it to be more than mere words.
Finally, I want to love mercy, but I want this to be shown by the way I love others, not the way I love saying it.

 

Tim Holt