Micah 1:3–5: “For behold, the LORD is coming out of His place; / He will come down / And tread on the high places of the earth. / The mountains will melt under Him, / And the valleys will split / Like wax before the fire, / Like waters poured down a steep place. / All this is for the transgression of Jacob / And for the sins of the house of Israel. / What is the transgression of Jacob? / Is it not Samaria? / And what are the high places of Judah? / Are they not Jerusalem?”

November 24th, 2021 by Pastor Ed in devotional

This is worded as though God had been away for a while but was coming back to check on what was happening down on earth. Of course God never goes away; all things are always before Him, every moment of every day. These verses predicted that in Micah’s day and also in the future, the end of time or last days, that God’s discipline will flow down, like water flows over Niagara Falls. In Micah’s day, the people of God had divided hearts; they had become double minded as they were stuck between 2 opinions. The heathen idol Baal was on one side and God Almighty was on the other. Because they had tried to keep one foot in the world and one foot in the Kingdom of God, they were about to experience the disciplining hand of God on their nation as a whole and on themselves individually.

God loves us too much to ignore, for any length of time, the sin that we haven’t repented of in our lives. He is looking for us to keep short accounts with Him, meaning we quickly turn and confess our sins to Him, as soon as we are convicted of them by the Holy Spirit. We must always be alert to the kind of seeds we allow to be planted in our hearts because they will eventually produce fruit of one kind or another. Good seeds bring good spiritual fruit and bad seeds bring weeds. We may at first be embarrassed when we allow the Holy Spirit to shine His divine spotlight into our hearts, but wisdom demands that we let Him clean out every closet in our soul through confession and repentance. When we do, we avoid God having to bring the stronger medicine of discipline. It is something like the problem of how rapidly grass grows in the summer, which requires weekly cutting. If the mower fails or something else prevents it from being cut weekly, the next time it is mowed it takes 2 passes to make it right. If we put off repentance until another day, we have a day more to repent of and a day less to repent in.

“LORD, we confess our sins to You and ask You to forgive us and use us this day, in Jesus’ name.”