‘To walk humbly with thy God.’  ’Can two walk together unless they be agreed?’ For walking with God there must be communion, based in love, and resulting in imitation.  And that communion must be constant, and run through all the life, like a golden thread through some web.  So, then, here is the minimum of the divine requirements, to give everybody what he has a right to, including the mercy to which he has a right, to have a lowly estimate of myself, and to live continually grasping the hand of God, and conscious of His overshadowing wing at all moments, and of conformity to His will at every step of the road.  That is the minimum; and the people who so glibly say, ‘That is my religion,’ have little consciousness of how far-reaching and how deep-down-going the requirements of this text are.  The requirements result from the very nature of God, and our relation to Him, and they are endorsed by our own consciences, for we all know that these, and nothing less than these are the duties that we owe to God.  So much for God’s requirements.

II.  Our failure.

There is not one of us that has come up to the standard.  Man after man may be conceived of as bringing in his hands the actions of his life, and laying them in the awful scales which God’s hand holds.  In the one are God’s requirements, in the other my life; and in every case down goes the weight, and ’weighed in the balances we are altogether lighter than vanity.’  We stand before the great Master in the school, and one by one we take up our copybooks; and there is not one of them that is not black with blots and erasures and swarming with errors.  The great cliff stands in front of us with the victor’s prize on its topmost ledge, and man after man tries to climb, and falls bruised and broken at the base.  ‘There is none righteous, no, not one.’  Micah’s requirements come to every man that will honestly take stock of his life and his character as the statement of an unreached and unreachable ideal to which he never has climbed nor ever can climb.

Oh, brethren! if these words are all the words that are to be said about God and me, then I know not what lies before the enlightened conscience except shuddering despair, and a paralysing consciousness of inevitable failure.  I beseech you, take these words, and go apart with them, and test your daily life by them.  God requires me to do justly.  Does there not rise before my memory many an act in which, in regard to persons and in regard to circumstances, I have fallen beneath that requirement?  He requires me ‘to love mercy.’  He requires me ‘to walk humbly,’ and I have often been inflated and self-conceited and presumptuous.  He requires me to walk with Himself, and I have shaken away His hand from me, and passed whole days without ever thinking of Him, and ’the God in whose hands’ my ‘breath is, and whose are all’ my ‘ways,’ I have ’not glorified.’  I cannot hammer this truth into your consciences.  You have to do it for yourselves.  But I beseech you, recognise the fact that you are implicated in the universal failure, and that God’s requirement is God’s condemnation of each of us.