Live Humbly - Micah 1:1-2:13

Good morning Harmony!

This past week I think has been pretty good, we got to serve our community a little bit, we were able to pray with some people at National Night Out and we had some games and some lemonade to give out, and that was pretty great. If you weren’t able to make it that’s ok, we had a pretty good volunteer base out there and I’m looking forward to planning and how that goes next year.

And today, my grandson is here!

Little Bernard is in the house, along with Anna and Edward, it’s a great day for our family as we are all able to gather today!

And today we begin a new series that really is a multi-generational message. It’s a message that every generation should take to heart and should strive for.

Today we begin a series on the book of Micah, a 5 week series aimed at showing us what it really looks like to live humble lives.

How many here have heard someone ask this question - “I thought you were a Christian?”

Many of us have heard that or possible said that to someone in our lives at some point or another.

And sometimes it’s a misunderstanding, where the other person has this legalistic outlook on what a Christian can and cannot do, such as what Bible to use or tattoos or whatever - things that don’t have a real impact on our Christianity.

But other times, when we are actually living in sin or doing something that hurts someone else, or we’ve been so inward and me focused that we have lost sight of God or others, those words strike a nerve.

And often times we’ll begin to defend ourselves or make excuses as to why we are doing these things.

We know the truth, but we avoid the truth and chase after those things that we want to do, and we fail to realize the impact that we leave on others about Christians as a whole.

Then we wonder why we are called hypocrites so often.

Our main point for today is that

Main Point: Our world teaches us to look out for number one, and to rise to the top. God’s Word teaches us to live humbly and serve Him.

Now Micah is a book in the Old Testament, written about 700ish years before Jesus. If you’re looking for it in your Bibles today it’s a fairly small book, just 7 chapters, and it comes right after the book of Jonah - and it’s kind of an apocalyptic book, at least for the Israelites as it’s really foretelling their looming captivity as they have continued to just go down this path of disobedience and defiance of the Lord.

And today we are going to look at the first two chapters, because they have a common theme to them and they really go together as to what is taking place in the nation as a whole.

Beginning in verse 1 -

Prayer.

From our Scripture today we can see three ways our level of humility or our level of response to God’s expectations can impact our walk with the Lord.

The first way is

1. A lack of humility causes us to sin against GOD. Ch 1

Chapter one starts out with telling us that it was Micah that received this word from the Lord in the days of these three kings - again, placing this book’s writing some 700 years before Christ, before the northern kingdom of Israel was captured by Assyria and almost 200 years before Judah was captured by Babylon.

He’s Micah of Moresheth. Now Moresheth was this small town in the southern part of Judah, so what this is telling us is that he wasn’t some rich guy who lived in the city, he was from the country regions of Judah.

So to put this into today’s perspective, he lived in a small town, like Laquey or Bois’D’arc - he’s from this tiny town where if you blink, you’ll miss it as you’re passing through.

And God calls him and says go to D.C. and give them this message. Go to your leaders and tell them these things.

And then like most country boys Micah gets right to the point, there isn’t a lot of flowery introduction. God places this message in Micah that Micah must proclaim, and he proceeds to tell them first that they have failed to humble themselves before God.

God will be a witness against you -

He tells the people that God is going to come and discipline you, He’s coming to take you away from this place and there’s going to be true discipline in the form of destruction and cleansing.

All of the stuff that you have accumulated that has caused you to become overly proud, it’s going to be leveled.

And verse 5 tells us why -

Micah 1:5 CSB

5 All this will happen because of Jacob’s rebellion and the sins of the house of Israel. What is the rebellion of Jacob? Isn’t it Samaria? And what is the high place of Judah? Isn’t it Jerusalem?

And verse 6 again tells us that God is going to discipline the nations for not living up to their true potential.

Let’s take a moment and remember why Israel was God’s chosen nation.

In Genesis 12:3 God tells Abraham:

Genesis 12:3 CSB

3 I will bless those who bless you, I will curse anyone who treats you with contempt, and all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you.

The main purpose of the nations of Israel was to bring hope to the world. They were God’s chosen people because God wanted all of the other nations to see Israel and know Him - but as we see time and time again throughout the Old Testament they failed to live up to that potential.

Now God still uses the Nation Israel to bring that hope in Jesus Christ, but even there the nation failed to recognize God’s plan through Him.

Verse 7 continues to give us why God’s punishment is needed for the people here -

Micah 1:7 CSB

7 All her carved images will be smashed to pieces; all her wages will be burned in the fire, and I will destroy all her idols. Since she collected the wages of a prostitute, they will be used again for a prostitute.

Let’s take a moment and evaluate this just with the Ten Commandments.

Exodus 20 gives the details here that these commandments are to Worship God alone, to not make idols, don’t use the Lord’s name in vain or in idle speech, and to keep the sabbath or the seventh day holy.

Now let’s talk about verse 7 from Micah for a moment - all her carved images will be smashed - so they have failed to worship God alone and they have made idols for worship.

All her wages will be burned - they weren’t keeping the sabbath or taking time to just focus on the Lord, instead they were looking at the profitability of working 7 days a week, and so they were failing to keep that commandment.

And in all of that I think it would be safe to say that God’s name wasn’t being treated that highly, since they were following after other gods and as it says prostituting, or following after and obeying these other false gods that were their idols from other nations around them.

So, all in all, they were completely disobedient and sinning against God. They lacked the humility and the loyalty necessary to rely on the God that saved them and made a covenant with them.

How does that apply to us today church?

There are a lot of the younger generations that have been leaving Christianity to go after other gods. Now why would they want to do that?

Let’s go back to that question from the beginning for a moment, where the question was “Aren’t you a Christian?”

If the church doesn’t act like the church, and to be clear I mean if the individuals of the church don’t follow and accurately carry out the love of Christ and live as He would have us to live, then why should those younger generations follow a God that you don’t follow.

“I’m just a sinner, saved by grace” - that’s true, if you are a believer in Christ that is a true statement. Now act like it.

God is seeking authentic believers that seek Him and follow Him, and the very first step in that is that we figure out who and what is important in our lives.

That means that if we have elevated anything else above God’s place on the throne of our hearts, we need to repent and allow God to clean house.

We cannot allow anything else to sit on that throne if we are believers in Christ. That means I can’t allow my bank account to sit on that throne. I can’t allow my car to sit on that throne. I can’t allow my family, my friends, my habits, or anything else to sit on that throne,

because if I do, then I stop being an authentic Christian, and the world can see that and will ask “I thought you were a Christian?”

And Micah cries and laments over the nations and he grieves for them for 9 verses.

he’s pouring out his heart in deep grief because of what is going to take place upon his people.

And that should be our reaction every time we fall into this sin and hear these words “aren’t you a Christian?” because we have failed to completely trust and follow the Savior and give God the throne of our hearts.

Every time we place our wants or our accumulation of things and wealth above the throne of God and we hear that question we need to examine what is going on in our lives and make sure that we are living in alignment with God on the throne of our lives, and it should grieve us if we are not because we have not only gone astray in our own hearts but we have also led someone else astray in doing that.

Because as Christians we live for Him, not for ourselves, and we are blessed because of Him in order to bless others.

The second way our level of humility affects us is toward others.

Chapter two tells us that

2. A lack of humility causes us to sin against MAN. vv. 2:1-11

In chapter two we see a shift from violating the first four commandments and failing to be loyal to God to those commandments that are for us to love our neighbor, the last six.

He says woe to those who dream up wickedness and prepare evil plans on their beds.

And then he proceeds to give testimony to what that is.

he talks about coveting or desiring someone elses stuff to the point where it consumes you - watching out for number one to keep up with the Jonses, and stealing it from the Jonses to make it happen!

And God says someone else is about to come and do that to you - its not karma, its discipline from God.

Look, when our kids were younger there were on occasions where one child would take a toy from another child, and then it was up to us to discipline them so that they knew that wasn’t right.

And so we would take the toy and give it back to the other child.

God is going to discipline them.

And of course they don’t like it!

Then Micah talks about those that are calling him a liar, and he asks them in verse 7

Micah 2:7 CSB

7 House of Jacob, should it be asked, “Is the Spirit of the Lord impatient? Are these the things he does?” Don’t my words bring good to the one who walks uprightly?

He says quit lying to yourselves and repent and live the lives that lift one another up rather than tearing them down!

Quit lying to one another!

Not only have they violated the first four commandments that press them to have loyalty to God alone, they also have failed to meet the other six that are meant for them to take care of one another.

The rich were getting richer by stealing and taking from the poor and the poor were getting poorer because what they did have was taken from them, and God says that isn’t how this is supposed to work.

And before anyone gets the idea that the Israelites were a unique situation and we aren’t like them, we need to look around and see that that exact same thing happens today.

And sometimes the greatest offenders are supposed to be Christians.

“I thought you were a Christian?” should mean something.

But usually when we’ve dropped our loyalty to God off on the way out the church doors it becomes a little bit easier to forget how to treat one another.

The first way Micah says that a lack of humility affects us is we lose our loyalty to God. We sin against God.

The second way a lack of humility affects us is we forget how to love our neighbor as ourselves. We sin against man.

The third way that humility affects us is a flip of that coin. The third way is that

3. A remnant of humility causes us to receive GRACE. vv. 2:12-13

It’s not all bad news.

Verses 12 and 13 give us a new sense of humility.

Micah 2:12–13 CSB

12 I will indeed gather all of you, Jacob; I will collect the remnant of Israel. I will bring them together like sheep in a pen, like a flock in the middle of its pasture. It will be noisy with people. 13 One who breaks open the way will advance before them; they will break out, pass through the city gate, and leave by it. Their King will pass through before them, the Lord as their leader.

I will gather all of you, Jacob, like sheep in a pen.

Again, all of this is before the captivity, but God here through Micah is telling the Israelites that they are going to return to their land. This remnant is going to come together by God’s leading to be gathered. And it’s going to be a big gathering.

Now to the Israelites, this was talking about an event that was going to take place for them specifically. They were going to be led from Babylon back to Israel, back to the promised land.

For us, this has a prophetic message to it as well.

Because it’s also talking about all of God’s people. It’s not just talking about Israel, it’s talking about all of those that come to know Christ as Lord and Savior.

Because He’s not just the God of Israel, He’s the Creator and Sustainer of the entire world.

Through Israel, God wanted to bless the entire world with a way to know Him and to seek Him.

Israel failed as a nation to do that, but through Israel God sent His only Son to redeem the whole world.

Our world teaches us to look out for number one, and to rise to the top. But that doesn’t save you. That doesn’t fulfill your desires, and that doesn’t fill the gap that remains.

God’s Word teaches us to live humbly and serve Him. Through that we can know Him, we can find rest, and we have a real hope in a future with Him that fulfills our every need.

Not only that, Jesus teaches us humility. He created everything, He sustains everything, He placed the stars and planets into orbit, and yet He humbly came to the earth, and if that wasn’t enough He was born in a lowly manger, lived a life of a humble servant, serving those who needed rest and healing and forgiveness, died the death you and I deserved, and was buried in a borrowed tomb.

It doesn’t get any more humble than that. Is He the Lord of your life?

Prayer.

If you’re here today and you’ve never humbled yourself before Jesus, you’ve never trusted Him and followed him, today you can make that decision to receive Christ and follow Him.

Today you can enter that relationship with Christ, and you can discover what it means to be an authentic follower of Christ. How it’s not about being perfect, how it’s about following Him and allowing Him to be on the throne of your life and how that changes you.

Today you can know the true love of God Who gave it all for you! God made a way when there was no way!

God loves you enough to send His Son Jesus to pay for your sins and to redeem you.

When there was nothing you could do to get to God, He humbled Himself and He gave of Himself for you.

Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, loves you enough to have paid that price. Jesus paid it all. Jesus Christ died for you, was buried for three days, and rose again to save you from sin, death, Hell, and the grave. He did that so that you could have real peace and real joy in a relationship with Him.

If you have never called out to God and received Christ as Lord and Savior, if you haven't done that at any point in your life, you can do that today.

If you feel that God is calling out to you to embrace Him as Lord and Savior, then you can simply come up here and someone will share with you how you can do that today, or you can text the number on the screen or fill out a connect card from your bulletin and someone will contact you today. If you’d like you can grab the person that invited, you or someone you know that is here and we will walk you through what that looks like and share who Jesus is with you.

As the music plays softly for just a moment more, if you would like to pray with someone or want to know more about following Christ, this is your opportunity. You can simply come up here and we will pray with you, or we will start that conversation with you, whatever it is, you can do that today as the music continues softly for just another minute or so.

Prayer.