Three Words: Justice, Mercy & Humility
Today's guest post is written by friend of Jubilee+, Jon Cressey (part of Emmanuel Church, Sheffield).
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If you are looking for a challenging text in Scripture that speaks of mercy in the face of poverty and injustice, then grab your phone, open your Bible, and bookmark Micah 6:8.
He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8, ESV).
Micah’s words pierce through the noise of any religious pretence and societal complacency we may have.
The three words are deceptively simple, yet their weight is unmistakable: justice, kindness, and humility.
These are not optional extras merely for the enthusiastic 'on fire for God' believer; they are the essence of what it means to know God.
When we follow Christ, we become part of a new, bigger, Christ-exalting and Scripture-honouring family that has dynamic new values, culture, and ethos. That new family places immense value on justice.
The Hebrew word in Micah, mishpat, is not just about punishment for wrongdoing, putting someone right, or correcting them—it’s about setting things right.
This sort of justice concerns the widow, the orphan, the foreigner—the marginalised and voiceless being heard, seen, and restored.
It’s the heartbeat of a God who refuses to look away from suffering.
Such justice isn’t something you admire from a distance, or a concept to be debated, or a virtue to be applauded. It is a loud call to action.
As Christians, we cannot ignore the cries of the poor or the plight of the oppressed. Their pain is not an inconvenience to our faith; rather it is a test of our faith's authenticity, evidenced in the words of Jesus when He said that how we treat “the least of these” is actually how we treat Him (Matthew 25:40).
Injustice anywhere, in any sphere, is an affront to the mercy we’ve been shown at the cross and simply cannot be tolerated.
Sadly, too often we do tolerate it — but that can change as we actively and intentionally look to God to help us change our perspective and values to reflect His.
Embedded in Micah's exhortation is kindness—or as some translations render it, mercy.
It's a rich Hebrew term for covenant love; not merely being nice.
More than that, it’s a tenacious, never-giving-up, never-walking-away kind of love. You've seen it in the ever-faithful way that God stands with you, for you, and in you, despite your shortcomings or unconscious bias about these things.
Mercy isn’t an abstract, 'out there' ideal; it’s personal, tangible, embodied—it’s the Good Samaritan stopping on the roadside, the father running to embrace the prodigal, Jesus stretching out His hand to touch the leper...
We love mercy simply (or profoundly) because we’ve also been loved with mercy.
The Gospel is, at its core, a mercy story with a backdrop that we deserved wrath, but we were given grace. We were the poor, the broken, the spiritually bankrupt, and yet, at just the right time, God in Christ stepped into our poverty, shouldered our shame, and gave us a seat at His table.
How can we, recipients of such extravagant kindness, withhold mercy from others? It makes no sense, and perhaps we need to remind ourselves of this as we hear the Gospel week after week (and even decade after decade).
To top it all, there’s humility. Micah places it last, but it undergirds the other two.
Without humility, our pursuit of justice becomes self-righteous; it becomes a tribute to us—our ability, importance, status, or our assumption that the world should seem to revolve around us. Without humility, our kindness easily becomes patronising.
To walk humbly with God is to recognise that we are not the hero of the story—He is. In Jeremiah’s terms, we are the clay; He is the potter. We are not saviours swooping in to fix the world; we are redeemed sinners offering the same mercy we’ve received to everyone, whether they respond or not—even when they have not asked for it.
Micah 6:8, even with its three-point prompt, is not a checklist to tick off; it’s a way of being, a lifestyle calling. It calls us to daily reflect God’s character—the God who defends the weak, lifts the lowly, and binds the brokenhearted. To live this way is costly and will demand more than you think you can give; it will also set you free.
Justice, mercy, and humility are not just what God requires; they are what He empowers, what He births in us as we walk with Him, and how the world glimpses the scandalous message of His Gospel.
One last thought: I like Micah's prompt here—it almost sounds like a cry of exasperation: "He has told you, O man, what is good..." There’s no getting out of it! What does God require? He has told you!
Don’t say you don’t know what God requires of you!
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With thanks to Jon Cressey for sharing his original post, available to view here. Find more reflections on church, scripture and prophecy by visiting joncressey.com.
