I Desired Mercy and Not Sacrifice

There is nobody in that church who works harder and everybody would tell you so.

He does the building. He does the rota nobody else will touch. He is there at seven on a Sunday and he is the last one out, and he has done a version of this for twenty two years across three congregations.

The machine runs beautifully.

And about four years ago something went out of it, and he cannot date it more precisely than that, and he has not mentioned it to anybody because he does not have the words and because the work is going well and nobody complains about a man who turns up.

What went out of it is him.

He does everything he did before and he feels nothing while doing it. Not resentment. Something flatter than resentment. He drives home on a Sunday and cannot remember whether the day was good or bad, only whether it ran.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He suspects that if he stopped serving, there would be nothing underneath it at all, and he is more frightened of finding that out than he is of the flatness.

Read what He says He wanted

There is a line in Hosea that Jesus quoted twice, and it is a comparison rather than a cancellation.

For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice; and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.Hosea 6:6

I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.

That construction is a Hebrew way of putting two things in order rather than throwing one away. God had commanded the sacrifices Himself, in writing, in detail, so this is not a rejection of the system. It is a statement about what the system was for.

Mercy here is the word for covenant loyalty and steadfast affection: the warm, loyal attachment between people bound to each other. And the knowledge of God, which is not information but the knowing of a person.

So the two things He names as what He actually wanted are both relational, and the two things He puts second are both activity, and the man doing enormous quantities of the second with none of the first is precisely the situation the verse describes.

Your work is placed second rather than thrown out, and Hosea 6:6 names mercy and the knowledge of God as what He desired. That is what the word actually orders, not a criticism of your years, and the Holy Spirit is the One who shows a working man what went out of it four years ago.

Nothing here takes the twenty two years off you

Now the plain thing, because men in your position hear this passage as a demolition and it is not one.

The building got built. The rota got covered. Hundreds of people have been in rooms that were warm because of a man who was there at seven, and none of that is being reclassified as worthless, and God has not been unimpressed by it.

What has happened is an order problem, and it is extremely common in the most reliable people, because reliability is rewarded and affection is invisible, and over twenty two years a man can be praised into a machine.

And the fear underneath is worth naming. You are afraid that under the serving there is nothing. That fear is what has kept the machine running at full speed for four years, because as long as it runs you never have to look.

And nothing about four flat years has ever made the twenty two hollow. Scripture puts sacrifice second rather than declaring it void, and the Holy Spirit is not taking a working man's whole history off him.

One thing that produces nothing

Here is the practical piece, and it is the opposite of everything you do well.

Do one thing this week for Him that nobody knows about and that produces nothing.

Not a task. Not a job that helps the church. Something with no output: twenty minutes on the ramp with nothing in your hands. A walk with Him and no agenda. Reading something that is not for a talk.

The two conditions are unwitnessed and unproductive, because both of the things that frighten you live in that combination, and because everything you've done for twenty two years has been visible and useful and you've never once found out what is underneath.

And if it feels like nothing, that is fine. That is what four years of flatness feels like when you stop moving.

You are able to be with Him without producing anything, and the producing was never what He desired first. Hosea 6:6 says I desired mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings, and the Holy Spirit is the One who meets a man on a ramp with nothing in his hands.