We’ve loved getting to read The 12 Minor Prophets as a church family. Thank you to those who’ve shared what they’ve been learning!
Nate Huntley: Micah
Life happens in seasons and cycles of difficulty and ease, trials and comfort.
The last year has been one of the hardest of my life, certainly the most difficult since becoming a follower of Christ almost 15 years ago. For years I worked in a calling to missions around the world. Over time something happened: The way I viewed God’s call became an idol of entitlement and identity.
The imagery of Jonathan’s sermon November 21st highlights the upside-down view I had developed regarding God’s gift and the Kingdom: I treated His love like a project to be worked and the work of ministry like a gift I deserved.
Through intensely wounding events, it became apparent I needed to leave the work behind.
Scripture is many things, one of the greatest is how it acts as a mirror to reflect the condition of our hearts and reality of our lives in comparison to God’s design and love for us.
Reading through Micah has proven to provide one of the clearest reflections of myself, and it hasn’t been a pretty picture.
The LORD gives a clear picture of how much it grieves Him when the people that call themselves His consistently live in a way that is antithetical to His Way, His Truth, His Life (John 14:6). To me, Micah points out the wayward nature of our hearts, ready to preach on a kingdom of comfort, self-help, indulging individual glories and gratifications, all the while becoming convinced that because we are chosen, we are free to live according to our own interpretation of God’s rhythms and destiny for us.
The Holy Spirit then comes roaring in with purpose of the prophets to point out where we have gone astray, calling to repentance the remanent of our heart that has been yearning for the Shepherd to lead us out of the enclosure we’ve built around ourselves and into the renewing pasture of His Kingdom (Micah 2). It is there that we find true justice, humility, and mercy. Not the false subjective kinds we toiled to build out of self-righteousness or so-called “anointing.”
This may feel or sound scathing for us believers, and it is. I say it because I am the person who has lived very recently working as someone preaching a false gospel, self-focused and caught in the idolatry of my success, image importance, and entitlement. But God, rich in mercy and justice, has brought my longing remanent heart peace as the idols were surrendered and stripped away, revealing Himself for me to humbly walk with again.
