WHAT DOES GOD WANT OF ME? (Part III)

This is the 3^rd part of my thoughts on Micah 6:8,”You know man what God wants of you, to Act Justly, Love Mercy, and Walk Humbly with your God.”
Previously I’ve spoken about acting justly and loving mercy/tenderly. I’d like to finish with the third and last requirement that God ask of us… to “Walk Humbly with your God.”
What does that really mean to walk humbly with God? Again, I would like to try to explain with a story…

Charles Plumb, a U.S. naval academy graduate, was a U.S. Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons he learned from that experience.

One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!”

“How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb.

“I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.”

Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-bottom trousers. I wonder how many times I might have seen him and not even said ‘Good morning, how are you?’ or anything because, you see I was a fighter pilot and he was just a sailor.”

Plumb thought of the man hours the sailor had spent on a long wooden table in the bowels of the ship, carefully weaving the shrouds and folding the silks of each chute, holding in his hands each time the fate of someone he didn’t know.

Who’s packing your parachute?  

Walking humbly with our God means to walk together toward God’s reign of love and justice.
This last clause of Micah 6:8 should never be read without the first 2 lines and their context.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
    and to walk humbly with your God.

Our relationship with God calls us to do three things:

1. Recognize WHO our God is.
2. Realize HOW our God is
3. Understand WHO WE ARE as God’s people.

To walk humbly with God is to realize Who is the God of our life. Whoever it is will shape the way we walk. Man’s sin always stems from forgetting who God is and man’s salvation is found in remembering and returning to God—the one true God!

When we forget, we return to EGYPT—that is to SLAVERY. When we remember and RETURN to God, we have FREEDOM!

What kind of God do we have? How is God for us? Are we making Him too small? Some of us see him as a “policeman, a parent hanging over us. When we do this, we make Him something He is not. We put limits on Him, and when we make Him something he is not, it’s idolatry, and idolatry leads us back to Egypt!

Our God is a God we can trust. One who leads us out of slavery into freedom. One who intervenes in history to bring us fullness of life! We are God’s people and, if we are God’s people, we must be for life, for love, for freedom, for peace, and for justice!

Why? Because God is for life, for love, for freedom, for peace and for justice! We are to walk humbly with our God in partnership with God and with each other to convey this most important reality to those we meet!

To walk humbly with our God, we must first acknowledge our sins and then be willing to submit to God’s mercy.
It is only through humbling ourselves that we will be allowed to walk with God. “God resists the proud but gives grace to the humble” (1 Peter 5:5).
St. Paul points out that it is “high mindedness” (Pride) that leads to unbelief and lack of faith in the power of God (Rom. 11:20; 12:3)

Jesus came to earth to tell us…no, show us, who He is, what He is and how He is! He showed us that He is not beyond contact. That He is someone who Loves us and wants to be in a personal relationship with us. He is one who wants to give us a better life! God is a personal God who knows us intimate and better than we know ourselves! He wants us to tell others about Himself and to show others who He is.

Whether we like it or not, we are all educators (teachers)! We all teach at least one other person who God is, or isn't, by our words, by our actions, by our beliefs, and by our very lives! We may not have a teaching degree, we didn’t train for it and most of us probably don’t even want the job but we’ve  got it!

“Walk humbly” is a description of the heart’s attitude toward God. God’s people depend on Him rather than on their own abilities (Micah 2:3) . St. Gregory of Nazianzus wrote a prayer noting his realization of this. He wrote:
I have been let down, O my Christ, by my excessive presumption; from the heights I have fallen very low. But lift me up now so that I may see that I have deceived myself; If again I trust too much in myself, I shall fall immediately and the fall will be fatal!”

We must all humbly recognize that no amount of personal sacrifice can replace a heart committed to justice and love.
The response of a godly heart is
1 Outward (do justice)
2 Inward (love mercy)
3 upward (walk humbly).

Once we realize and accept Who, How and What God really is; then the first two lines of Micah 6:8 will become a part of who we are! We will be able to Act Justly, Love Tenderly/Mercy and Walk humbly with our God. We will be living our lives and fulfilling our mission for which we were created, being who God intended us to be, his children.

Looking back to the story.. who packs your parachute… Realize that God Packs your parachute… but He does it with the help of others. We all need or will need physical help, emotional help, and spiritual help. Sometimes in the daily challenges that life gives us, we miss what is really important. 

As you go through this week, this month, this year, recognize the people who helped to pack your parachute.