Micah 6:1-8
One great challenge in parenting is teaching children to get along. Brothers and sisters have amazing ability to get on one another’s nerves. Sometimes they act like best buddies. You can look out your back yard window and see them playing harmoniously on the play structure or making a snow man together. Other times you look out your back window to see one sibling trapped inside the play structure with other siblings keeping them there as prisoner. Or instead of making a snow man together, one sibling tries to put the other sibling inside the snow man.
Now I’m sure nothing like that ever happened in your family. I remember having to teach our kids things like “No, you may not to wrap a cord around your brother’s neck and see if he’ll choke.” Or “It’s not okay to take your little sister and wrap her up in blankets so she can’t move and then push her around in a laundry basket.” Sometimes, after we saved the life of the particular child under threat that day, we would teach or more often force our children to say sorry. Most of the time they obliged us with the obligatory “sorry” while giving the death stare to their sibling the second we looked away.
Most of us probably had similar training from our parents as we grew up. But as we grow into teenage, young adult and adult years, we still need to work at getting along. Most people here probably can think of one or more person we struggle to get along with. We have to decide what we will do about the relationship especially with those closest to us. Broken relationships need restoration if we’re going to get along. The same is true in our relationship with God. Sometimes it’s close, sometimes it’s strained.
Today, we are going to follow a conversation about a broken relationship between God and His people. God will initiate the process of restoring the relationship. As He does this, He reveals ways His people, like you and me, can maintain a good relationship with Him. If we will follow these ways, we can contribute to worship that pleases Him. After all, worship is vital to our relationship with God. If we’re not engaged in appropriate worship, we will not be in a good relationship with God. So we will learn some ways that contribute to healthy God pleasing worship.
