“Say to all the people of the land and the priests, ‘When you fasted and mourned in the fifth month and in the seventh, for these seventy years, was it for me that you fasted?'” Zechariah 7:5
December 28, 2023
There is the danger of doing things for God, then when we turn in our paper for a grade we get an F. For seventy years Israel had observed annual fasts commemorating the burning of Jerusalem in 586 B.C. It was a self-imposed ritual but not done out of sorrow and repentance. We can do that sort of thing thinking that God owes us something if we give to Him sacrificially, attend church, pray, or inconvenience ourselves for a good cause. God knew the hearts of the people who asked, if they had to keep on mourning and fasting. We can’t fool God. He knows our motives. Self-pity and self-righteousness do not escape His notice. God wants joyful obedience to Him, not grim duty. Do we do what we do for God out of reverence and love for Him? That’s the kind of paper that gets an A.
H
God does not want sacrifice as a substitute for loving obedience.