Reflection by The Rev'd Dr. Deborah Broome

A Life Shaped by God

Hear what the Lord says:

Rise, plead your case before the mountains, and let the hills hear your voice.

Hear, you mountains, the case of the Lord, and you enduring foundations of the earth,

for the Lord has a case against his people, and he will contend with Israel.

“O my people, what have I done to you? In what have I wearied you? Answer me!

For I brought you up from the land of Egypt and redeemed you from the house of slavery,

and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.  O my people, remember now what King Balak of Moab devised, what Balaam son of Beor answered him, and what happened from Shittim to Gilgal, that you may know the saving acts of the Lord.”

“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?

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?”

He has told you, O mortal, 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 6:1-8

What does a life shaped by God actually look like?  And how do our lives line up with that?

Micah begins with urgency. The prophet sets the scene like a covenant lawsuit: God calls creation to witness, challenging the people to remember.  Remember being brought out of Egypt.  Remember the leaders God gave.  Remember God’s faithfulness, God’s justice, God’s blessing.  God has kept the covenant – but the people have not.  They’ve forgotten their basic duties to God and neighbour, and now they ask a desperate question: What does the Lord require?  More sacrifices?  More elaborate rituals?  Larger and grander offerings?

But God isn’t asking for escalating religious performance.  God doesn’t want more sacrifices, more spectacle.  God wants transformed lives.  The people frame their response in terms of commodities – more animals, rivers of oil, things that cost even more – but God doesn’t want our stuff.  God wants us.  God isn’t asking for something external, but for people to live in a particular way: do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God. 

These three are not new commands. They summarise the whole prophetic tradition and, actually, the whole story of Scripture.  To do justice is to pursue relational fairness, to protect the vulnerable, to correct inequality, to ensure that those who are poor or powerless aren’t forgotten.  To love kindness – that beautiful Hebrew word hesed – is to practise covenant loyalty, the steadfast and faithful love God shows to us, lived out toward one another and toward God.  And to walk humbly with God doesn’t mean grovelling.  It means living in step with God’s character, with an awareness that our lives depend on God’s grace and not on our own achievement.  

Micah offers a vision of faith where covenant, not commodity, lies at the centre.  True worship, Micah says, is shown not in extravagant display but in lives that reflect God’s justice, kindness, and humility.  St Paul, writing to the Christians in Corinth in another of Sunday’s readings (1 Corinthians 1:18-31), presses this further. If Micah calls us to walk humbly with God, Paul points us straight to the place where divine humility is revealed most clearly: the cross. It’s difficult for us to appreciate just how shocking the cross was to his first audience. The cross has become so familiar – in worship spaces, and as jewellery – that we forget how shameful a death it was.  In the ancient world it symbolised shame, degradation, and failure: it was designed to humiliate as much as to kill.  And yet Paul insists the cross is the very expression of “the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Paul is clear: intellect only takes us so far, as do signs and wonders, as do our own efforts to control or impress. The cross confronts us with a God who refuses to operate on our terms. Instead, God reveals power through vulnerability and wisdom through apparent absurdity.  It’s an upside‑down vision of life with God, like the one we find in the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1-12).  These describe the shape of the community God blesses: the poor in spirit, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness, the merciful, the peacemakers.

What, then, does a life shaped by God look like?  It looks like belonging to a community where the values of the Beatitudes make sense.  A community where purity of heart, compassion, humility, and peace‑making aren’t optional extras but signs of God at work.  A community where justice, kindness, and humble walking with God are what we do every day.  Thankfully this isn’t a solo project but a shared journey.

So perhaps the question for us is this:  How might justice, kindness, and humble walking take shape among us this week?  Who needs to see these qualities lived out in us?  And what might we discover about God – and about ourselves – when we live this way together?