What God Desires

God is after your heart and to have a relationship with God means that you are willing for God to change your heart.

Matthew 12:1-13 - 1 At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 But when the Pharisees saw it, they said to him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” 3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, and those who were with him: 4 how he entered the house of God and ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him to eat nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests? 5 Or have you not read in the Law how on the Sabbath the priests in the temple profane the Sabbath and are guiltless? 6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 7 And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

9 He went on from there and entered their synagogue. 10 And a man was there with a withered hand. And they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?”—so that they might accuse him. 11 He said to them, “Which one of you who has a sheep, if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not take hold of it and lift it out? 12 Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” 13 Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, healthy like the other.

Well, Christmas is over unless you're a member of the Orthodox Church. They celebrate Christmas this week, don't they? But, for most of us, Christmas is over and I'm wondering how many times it has been replayed… the experience of seeing a child open the present and they play with the box instead of the toy. You're laughing because you've seen kids do that, haven't you?

There's a new wrinkle on that. It's called bubble wrap, right? The kid opens the box and they don't see the present. They see the bubble wrap and they’ve got to pop every single one of those little suckers before they look at the present. Snap, snap, snap, snap, and drive you crazy, doesn't it?

There was a great quotation that I came across. I wonder what was in the mind of Matthew Henry when he wrote this. He was a Bible expositor and preacher and he wrote in the 18th century so I know they didn't have bubble wrap in those days, but I found this quote from him.

He's talking about Israel and what the Lord had given to them and entrusted to them and he's summarizing what the Israel of the Old Testament repeatedly did— how they disobeyed God and they had to be brought back to God. Matthew Henry said this— that Israel was given jewels of mercy, goodness, and loyalty in a cabinet of sacrifices and offerings. They kept the cabinet but pawned the jewels.

It’s an interesting quotation because that was a description of what we see in the Old Testament repeatedly— that what God gave to them, the heart of what he had given to them, were these qualities, these gifts, and yet what they focused on was the cabinet that they came in, the cabinet of their worship, the ceremonies, the sacrifices.

All of the procedures of their worship is what they focused on and they remained focused on that rather than what the Lord wanted them to have as precious jewels, the way they treasured things in their hearts as to the way they live.

And so, when we see this, we want to ask the question, “What did God desire for them?” He had given these gifts, these qualities, to His people, His chosen people. What did He desire of them?

How many times does God need to say something before we take note of it? I think you know the answer to that, don't you? God only has to speak once. Maybe as a parent you try to get that into your kids' mind— “when I say this, I mean it the first time I say it.”

But what about something that God repeats? If we should take note of what God says the first time that He says it, that when God repeats something, how much more power and strength and emphasis can it give.

So what I’d like to do today is look at three passages that we can consider where God repeats Himself and see what significance the repetition of this sentiment holds for us.

Hosea 6:6

The first passage we want to look at is found in the prophet Hosea. In Hosea’s day, they were going through this pattern, the same pattern of straying from the Lord and yet they came to the conclusion that the Lord's going to restore them, the Lord's going to make things new again, and we see this in the context of the passage.

In the first three verses of Hosea 6, the people of Israel and Judah are speaking and they say,

1 “Come, let us return to the Lord;    for he has torn us, that he may heal us;    he has struck us down, and he will bind us up.2 After two days he will revive us;    on the third day he will raise us up,    that we may live before him.3 Let us know; let us press on to know the Lord;    his going out is sure as the dawn;he will come to us as the showers,    as the spring rains that water the earth.”

They were confident that God was going to help them. They knew that they disobeyed. They said it right in the beginning, “Come let us return to the Lord,” it's time to get back to the Lord but He's going to look the other way. He's going to overlook our problems and our sinfulness and our disloyalty to Him.

Going down to verse 4, and the Lord says,

4 What shall I do with you, O Ephraim?    What shall I do with you, O Judah?Your love is like a morning cloud,    like the dew that goes early away.

So the Lord's saying to them, you're counting on Me to just come to you again and again but your love is not very lasting. Your love is very, very fleeting.

Jump to verse 6, and the Lord says,

6 For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,    the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.

What God was telling them was that they had overlooked this quality of steadfast love. It's a wonderful little Hebrew word, khesed. It's a word that you can't boil it down to just one single English word. It really means so many things. It means the loyal, steadfast, faithful, lovingkindness that God wants us to have toward Him and to others and, of course, that He has for us for He is loyal to us and He pours His unfailing love upon us.

 He says to the people of Israel, what I want for you is not what you're giving Me. You're giving Me some ceremonies. You're giving Me some trappings of worship. You're giving Me some procedures that you're following but I want something different. I want your loyal, steadfast love. That's the context that we have in in Hosea.

The whole point of a relationship with God is that we be changed by Him. That's what He's driving at here. He's saying, you're going through some motions, Israel. You're going through some ceremonies and what I want is to change you. I want your heart to become like My heart. I want you to treasure the things that I've given you. But they pawned the jewels and kept the cabinet, didn't they?

Hosea shows that the whole point of a relationship with God is to be changed by Him. That should hold for us today, too, shouldn't it?

Matthew 9:13

We go on to the second passage in the gospel of Matthew. Matthew 9 begins with a description of this paralyzed man and Jesus comes to him and he says in Matthew 9:2, “Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven.”

Jesus says, your sins will be forgiven and they are forgiven but His opponents, His adversaries, the people who were rejecting His claims and His authority, they take offense at Jesus. They even say that He's blaspheming to claim that kind of authority. They were very much in opposition to what Jesus had just said.

Jesus heals the man as evidence of the fact that He had authority to forgive for what's easier to do say— your sins are forgiven or to make a demonstration of the power of healing? Jesus demonstrates His very power and authority but they're not accepting it.

The passage goes on in chapter 9. Jesus calls Matthew, one of the tax collectors, and He says to follow Him and in the context of Matthew 9, again the opponents come and in verse 11, when the Pharisees saw this, they asked Jesus’ disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors sinners?” Of course Jesus had a reason for that, didn't He? He was viewing these people differently than the Pharisees were viewing them.

Now we all know that people who are tax collectors aren't usually not the ones you applaud, right? I don't usually find people who are thrilled with paying their taxes but, of course, in the days of Jesus when Matthew was a tax collector, they took it to a new level; they didn't just collect the taxes; they charged an extra amount and they kept that for themselves so not only were they considered traitors to the nation of Israel by working for the Roman government but they were actually abusing their authority and keeping money for themselves.

By the way, they had all of these ranks of soldiers that could enforce it. Call the soldiers on this guy who didn't pay the taxes and they could prod them a little bit with those spears and swords so they could collect the money and then the tax collectors pocketed some for themselves.

Not only were they traitors but they were thieves and so it's understandable that the people of the day looked down on them and didn’t associate with them.

Tax collectors and sinners— who are the sinners? There's probably a spectrum of descriptions we could give but part of this was people who had professions that rendered them ceremonially unclean like a tanner who work with dead bodies of animals that made them unclean. They couldn't come into the temple worship nor abide by the rules and so they were excluded and so they were looked down upon merely because their profession made them in an unclean state as far as ceremony went.

What they were basically saying is that, we don't care about these people. They might be a tax collector but they’re still a person created in God's image and these guys that have these circumstances that cause them to be unclean in a ceremonial sense, well, we don't care about them either.

They were just focused in on their rules and Jesus begins to point out the fact that they weren't really having a heart for people the way that God had a heart for them.

In response to Matthew 9:11, Jesus replies in verse 12-13, “12 But when he heard it, he said, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. 13 Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.”

The word in the New Testament that is used for mercy is the Greek translation of the word khesed in Hosea 6 and so what does Jesus do in response to the to the lack of interest of seeing people as individuals? He says, you need to go back to your scriptures. He's telling the spiritual leaders of the day, you didn't learn the lesson that God said very clearly that what He desires is your mercy, your khesed, your loyal, unfailing lovingkindness that you show for God and for your fellow man.

I desire mercy and not sacrifice, he says. You're so much into your rules about worship and I'm interested in something different.

I'm glad that we sang The Heart of Worship this morning because that's what Jesus was driving home. He's driving home to these Pharisees that God is not interested in the way you observe all your rituals in such an exacting way. He wants to get to your heart again. We're back to a relationship that's changed as a person because of the relationship with God and so Jesus brings them back to scripture and says, you really need to have mercy for everyone even those who you consider to be sinners and unclean.

Matthew 12:7

For our third passage of scripture, we see the context here in Matthew 12:1-8 that the opponents are dealing with Jesus’ disciples because they went into the fields, plucked some grain, rubbed it between their hands, blew away the chaff, and ate it.

I don't know if that's their version of trail mix or what but now by the same token, this was on a Sabbath day so that made this work (harvested, threshed, winnowed, ate). Well that's work. It was a hair splitting, very, very fine interpretation of the fact that to rub your hands around some grain was doing work and so they forbade this but the law of Moses made provision for the poor and the hungry that they could go into the field.

This is not that they were accusing the disciples of stealing the food by going and picking a few ears of it. Deuteronomy 23:25 tells us that it was acceptable if you're poor and you're hungry, that you can go into a field and you can make a little meal of the grain there and it wasn't considered thievery. If you cut a whole bunch of it and stuck it in a big bushel pack and carried that away, that's another story, but it said if you were hungry you could make a little meal of this and so they weren't doing anything wrong according to the law but what they were doing was the interpretation that the Pharisees put upon that as work and breaking the Sabbath.

Jesus is telling them, you don't really care for the poor and the hungry, do you? And so He confronts them over this and He says, you can't do this stuff.

We see further on the same day, a little bit further down in the passage in verse 9, Jesus went on from there and entered the synagogue on the Sabbath day and again we see a person with a withered hand and again it's the same idea that he's healing on the Sabbath day and they said that Jesus was breaking all the rules and you can't heal anybody on the Sabbath

day.

Again, they show their hardness of heart but what does Jesus say to them in verses 7-8? He says. “7 And if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.”

Jesus repeats this thought for the third time. Hosea gave it and then in Matthew 9, Jesus quotes it, and in Matthew 12, Jesus quotes it again. God is three times driving this home to us what He wants of us— He desires something from us, so how are we going to interpret this?

Applications

The vision of our church is to be a Christ-centered diverse Community caring for every generation every situation.

With the emphasis, for the sake of our focus today, on the word caring, we're thinking about caring. We thought about caring all last year. We had caring moments when we talked about times when we received care or gave care.

How are we going to carry out this as the vision of our church? How are we going to accomplish what these three passages tell us about? How do we accomplish our vision for being a caring church?

With Caring that Lives Out the Values of the Kingdom of God

We’ll accomplish the vision with caring that lives out the values of the kingdom of God. That's what Jesus was doing, wasn't He? He lived out the values of the kingdom of God before their eyes and then they rejected him for it but the people saw something different in Jesus, did they?

People began to follow Jesus because of what he demonstrated and that's we're what we're to demonstrate and that's really what the early church had. The early church had no political power, no majority of the population, and no influence. All they had were the values of the kingdom of God and we can read many, many stories of the early church and the       church through history and what they did just by living out the values of the kingdom of God.

When the plagues came in Europe and hit a city, everybody said, well, it's time to leave and they'd leave all the sick people behind and they'd go away until they were all dead and then they’d come back and clean up the mess and went about life. But what did the Christians do? History records that the Christians stayed there and ministered to the sick and the dying and, yes, some of them died, too, because they contracted the plague as well. But because the Christians were living out the values of the kingdom of God, that made a huge impact on the world around them and that's how Christianity gained a foothold by Christians living out the values of the word of God.

I read another story somewhere, years ago that on the African continent, there was a rebellion of one group against the other and the first group was defeated so all their men were incarcerated. Normally, what would happen in a circumstance like that is that the families would have no way to care for themselves and the women and children were left without the men and eventually the families just dispersed. After a time, these men were released from their imprisonment and they came back to their village and were expecting to find the families gone. They found something different. They found their families intact. Mothers were cared for and children were fed because the Christians in the area took care of them. The Christians understood that these families would be dispersed and disbanded and so they lived out the values of the kingdom of God.

That's how a culture has changed when people live out the values of the kingdom of God. That's what God desires of us and when He says, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” what He's saying is, you live out the values of the kingdom of God, don't just do some outward ceremonies, outward trappings, you just don't say, oh well, I went to church today so I'm good.

No, God is after your heart and to have a relationship with God means that you are willing for God to change your heart. You're willing for God to refine you from all of the ways of our sinful nature to be more like His heart. That's what it means to have a relationship with Him.

With Caring that Balances Both Mercy and Ceremony

Where mercy is lacking, religious formality is meaningless. We can have a religious observance but it's meaningless if our hearts are not right with God. Without this quality of mercy, without this heart, God who causes us to change, observances lose their meaning and so the application is caring that balances mercy and worship.

When God said, “I desire mercy and not sacrifice,” He didn't mean he didn't want us to worship at all but He wants us to hold that in a balance that if we don't have the lovingkindness part that comes first, then the worship activities become meaningless so it's got to be held in a balance. To put it another way, to not let the pendulum swing in the other direction.

I know something about pendulums since I like to tinker with old clocks. When you have a clock and it's out of balance far enough, the clock doesn't work. You can always tell because the tick-tock is not a tick-tock. It goes TICK-TOCK ticktock ticktock. Then, you make a little adjustment but if you go too far in the other direction, what you get is TOCK-TICK tocktick tocktick and that's not good. You need a nice even tick-tock tick-tock. Then you're in balance.

What Jesus is telling the people when he quotes Hosea 6 twice is that He’s telling you, I don't want you out of balance; I want you to tick-tock properly. I want you to get the things in the right order. I want your heart to be right with God. I want you to come before God and worship and say, God change my heart that I might be like you.

When you do that, then you'll have this heart of mercy, this lovingkindness and you'll worship God properly because you'll be in balance. If it's just an external thing, you get out of balance. We don't accomplish our purpose.

To keep in balance, you need some intentionality about this caring, this lovingkindness, this khesed, this mercy. You don't need a program to do that part of what I'm discharged to do in the church here is to oversee caring. We have structures, but you don't need a structure or a program or anything to care about people. Just do it but we have certain structures and things that you can involve yourself in opportunities. They have a purpose and if you're looking for ideas, we have ways to connect you with the Care Ministry within the church but the point is, you need to be intentional about it.

Whether you look to some opportunity in the church or whether you just look at the world and see a need and meet it, that's what God wants for you to be— intentional in your expression of this compassion for the world around you.

With Caring that Flows Out of Being a Christian

I talked about that before in those illustrations from history— that our inward motives produce the outward actions. Sometimes we produce the right actions outwardly but it comes from a wrong motive. That's not what God wants. He wants us instead to have inward motivations that will produce the proper outward actions— actions like forgiveness and kindness, the sacrifice of our time for the sake of someone else, generosity, concern that an unjust situation is set right.

It's a relationship with Jesus that produces these actions. It's not something that comes on your own when your motivation is, well I'm going to be a better person, well that works for a while. It's like all those other resolutions you make. If you're doing that in your own strength, you know you're not going to get too far. You're going to get to, maybe, the middle of February and that's the end of it. I'm not knocking resolutions; what I'm saying is to produce change, it's got to come from within your heart and that is what's born out of the relationship with God.

Do you have that relationship? Are you confident of your relationship with Jesus? If you're not, I would be delighted to sit down with the word of God and show you how you might know with assurance that you have this relationship with God because relationship with God can only come when we are cleansed of our sins and we can't do that ourselves.

It has to be done for us and the Bible tells us how that's done for us. It's done because Jesus paid the price of our sins and it's done when we call out in faith and say “Jesus, I know that You're the only one that can take my sins away. I put my faith in you. I'm trusting You to fulfill Your word to take my sins away and make me a new person.”

And He will do that and I pray that you have had that moment in your life where you've come to grips with the fact that you cannot get into God's presence because of your sin and Jesus is the only one that can take it away for you out of that relationship with God.

Then you desire for him to change you to make you more like Him and that won't come from the weakness of your own flesh. That will come from the spirit of God working in you so I trust that you have that relationship with Jesus.

If you don't, we want to encourage you to consider that today. Your need for the Savior who will save you from your sins and out of that, you will fulfill what Jesus says. “I desire mercy. I desire lovingkindness more than the outward circumstances of worship.”

May the Lord bless you as you take to heart His Word today.

Study Questions

1.       What does it mean that Israel was given jewels of mercy, goodness, and loyalty in a cabinet of sacrifices and offerings, but they kept the cabinet and pawned the jewels?

2.       What is the significance of God repeating what he says?

3.       What is the context of Hosea’s word in Hosea 6:6?

4.       What does Hosea 6:6 mean to you?

5.       What is the context of Matthew 9:1-13? Why does Jesus quote Hosea 6:6 in Matthew 9:12-13?

6.       What is the context of Matthew 12:1-14? Why does Jesus quote Hosea 6:6 in Matthew 12:7?

Deeper Study Questions

1.       What does it mean to live out the values of the kingdom of God?

2.       What is the balance of mercy (lovingkindness) and worship?

3.       How does caring flow out of a relationship to Jesus?

Read More

Hear the full message

Read more blogs