An old to-do list to get you closer to God

Q: Q: What, as a disciple of God, should be my main priority (Examples: forgiveness, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, comfort the sick, etc.)? Thank you. -- from M

A: My favorite short list of the things God most wants us to do is the famous list from the prophet Micah in Micah 6:8, "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"

-- Do Justice. This means that whatever we believe about God means nothing if those beliefs do not produce a more just world. Serving God means, at its root, serving virtue -- and justice is the root of virtue. We cannot be comfortable in our worship of God and service to God if that worship and that service do not include making all God's people (and that means all people) safe and secure and free from fear. Justice is impossible unless we believe that all people are equal. The belief that we must change the world to make all people free is one of the revolutionary beliefs the God through the Bible brought into the world. Justice is the first task of believers. It is the proof that our beliefs can change the world. Justice depends upon equality and believing that we are made in the image of God establishes that equality. In the case of the founding of America, "all men are created equal" in our secular document the Declaration of Independence is both the beginning of faith and the beginning of freedom.

-- Love Mercy. Justice is about giving people what they deserve. Mercy is about giving people what they need. They say that justice must be blind and by that we mean that justice must be impartial, yet in our world sometimes we need to be partial. Mercy is helping someone who has no claim on your help. We learn about mercy because we are sinners and we pray to God to forgive in mercy our sins. If the pure standards of justice were employed in judging any of us, we could not survive God's judgment. That is why we pray that God will temper judgment's severe decree with acts of mercy -- acts of purification and forgiveness -- that we do not merit but receive anyway because of God's merciful love. Every faith has a way of describing God's mercy. For Judaism and Islam, mercy comes from God directly. From Christianity mercy comes from God through Christ. Either way we are the recipients of God's mercy and the consequence of this most miraculous and loving gift is that we must show the kind of mercy to others that we plead to God be shown to us. The very best definition of mercy I ever heard was in a blessing given by a grandfather who had lived through the Holocaust to his grandson on the day of his grandson's bar mitzvah. He said, with tears in his eyes, "In this life you will meet people who need help ... If you can help 'em, help 'em."

-- Walk humbly with your God. The least appropriate quality for a religious person is arrogance. Arrogance is the belief that we are better than others. It is the belief that we have nothing to learn from others. It is the belief that that we are always right. None of those arrogant attitudes are true and if we give into them we become impossible to be around. The opposite of arrogance is humility. Humility is the belief that we can learn something from every person we meet. The Bible could have praised Moses for a thousand qualities. He was a strong leader and a faithful servant of God, but the one quality used to describe Moses was that he was humble, "Now Moses was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth." (Numbers 12:3)

Humility is the last of the three tasks that God seeks of us, because without humility we cannot do justice and we cannot love mercy. Sometimes what we think is justice or mercy is not really justice or mercy at all. It is hard to know what justice or mercy demands in any given situation. That is why we must approach all of God's tasks with the humility to realize that we could be wrong.

True humility does not mean that you are supposed to think of yourself as nothing. The great theologian and preacher Rick Warren said, "True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less." Yes. Think less about yourself and more about Micah's list and you will indeed become a true disciple of God.

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including "Religion for Dummies," co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman.)