Among all the offerings the Law prescribed, the burnt offering was distinct in one way: nothing was kept back. The grain offering gave a portion. The peace offering shared the meal. The sin offering atoned for a specific failure. But the burnt offering gave everything. The entire animal was consumed on the altar. It was the offering of total devotion, the one that said: I hold nothing in reserve before you.
Which makes what God says through Hosea so difficult to receive:
“For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” — Hosea 6:6
He is not dismissing a minor ritual. He is saying that total outward consecration — the most complete act of devotion the system could produce — is not the deepest thing He is after. A person could give everything the law required, hold nothing back, and still not be giving what God wanted most.
This is what makes the verse serious for us. When we fast, we hold nothing back. When we pray at length, we give our time, our attention, our words. When we discipline ourselves for godliness, we are offering something costly. These are our burnt offerings. And God is saying: I desire knowledge of me over even that.
The issue was not the offering. The issue was the offering without knowledge. Devotion without intimacy. Consecration without relationship.
The frame shifts but the diagnosis does not. Jesus names it in the language of ordinary worship rather than the sacrificial system, in Matthew 15:8:
“This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”
The lips were active. The heart was absent. The outward form was present. The inward reality was not.
Peter names the positive counterpart in 2 Peter 1:3:
“His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us.”
Not primarily through the practices, not through the disciplines as such, but through the knowledge of Him. Everything that pertains to life and godliness flows from that knowledge as its source. The practices are not the fountain. They are what grows near it — and they are also how, in God’s mercy, we are brought back to it. Means and fruit at once.
The greatest danger in the Christian life is not inactivity. It is activity without intimacy.
Spiritual Insurance
Activity without intimacy does not usually begin as rebellion. It begins as effort. Sincere, sustained, costly effort that gradually substitutes the doing for the knowing without the shift ever being named.
If I pray this way, God will answer. If I fast long enough, breakthrough will come. Give enough, and blessing will follow. Worship intensely enough, and God will move.
Most of us would not frame it so baldly. But the logic runs underneath a great deal of sincere religious effort. The activity is real. The intimacy has quietly been replaced by a transaction.
And it is not new.
In the Old Testament, Israel often treated sacrifice as spiritual insurance. The system God had given for drawing near became a mechanism for managing Him: perform the ritual correctly, secure divine favor, repeat.
The prophets exposed this with force. In Isaiah 1, God does not simply correct the misunderstanding. He names His own response to it: their incense is detestable, their appointed feasts His soul hates, He will not listen when they lift their hands in prayer.
The language is worth sitting with. This is not a teacher correcting a student’s error. This is a husband describing what it is to watch devotion performed by someone whose heart left long ago. The ritual was multiplied. The intimacy was gone. And what God says about that is not mild disappointment. It is revulsion.
The distortion takes different shapes in the New Testament but the logic is the same. Jesus warns against praying like the Gentiles in Matthew 6, who think they will be heard because of many words. That is formula thinking. Quantity equals outcome. And so Jesus teaches them to pray relationally: “Our Father.” Not technique. Relationship.
The distortion also takes hold in the posture of the person, not only in the practice itself. In Luke 18, Jesus contrasts two men at prayer. The Pharisee has the credentials: fasting twice a week, tithing everything. By any measure of religious output, his practice is exemplary. But his prayer is addressed to himself as much as to God. The tax collector brings nothing but his need: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” Only one went home justified.
The difference was not the practice. It was the posture. One was managing his account with God. The other was simply turning toward Him.
When practice becomes formula, our posture shifts. God becomes someone to influence rather than someone to know.
Already Good. Already Near.
Everything changes when we begin with who God actually is.
If the God behind the practices were reluctant or distant, then the practices would need to be strategies for closing the gap. But that is not who He is. God is a Father who gives good gifts, as Jesus says in Matthew 7:11. He is already generous, shown supremely in the cross. When we know Him as He actually is, the practices change not because we have better technique but because the one they are directed toward is different from the one we imagined.
Paul understood this from the inside. He was not a casual observer of the religious system. He was its product: circumcised on the eighth day, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee, blameless under the law by his own account. If credentials could close the distance between a person and God, Paul had them. And then in Philippians 3:8–10 he names it all as loss:
“I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord… that I may know him and the power of his resurrection.”
He is not abandoning practice. He is reorienting it entirely. The goal was never the accumulation. It was always the knowing. Every credential, every discipline, every act of faithfulness. Not discarded, but reordered around the one thing that gave it meaning.
What We Are Returning To
That reordering was not Paul’s initiative. It never is. “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). This is the pattern running beneath the whole of Scripture.
Before Israel receives the Law in Exodus 20, they are first delivered from Egypt in Exodus 14. Rescue precedes requirement. He says, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt.” Relationship comes first. The Law arrives not to create the covenant but to describe how a people who already belong to God are meant to live.
The New Testament carries the same pattern. In John 15, Jesus says, “Abide in me.” Only then does He speak of fruit. Fruit is not manufactured. It grows from abiding. The doing flows from the being. The practice flows from the presence. And in John 17:3, Jesus defines the destination itself: “This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” The life He came to give is constituted by knowing the Father.
The practices are what the relationship looks like when it takes form. We are not trying to establish something new. We are returning to the design.
This is not a series about improving your practice. It is about reclaiming that order.
Before any practice can be reclaimed, we need to understand the one God has given to make that possible. The next essay turns there.
A personal note:
I came back to faith a skeptic. There was no prodigal daughter moment, no dramatic turning point. There was just a woman on my Instagram feed.
She had just had a miscarriage. She was still in the middle of it, not on the other side with a tidy testimony, and she was writing about how she felt God had led her through the harder road. And somehow, impossibly, she still sounded like someone in love.
I had heard the kind of faith story where everything works out and the person looks back and sees God’s hand in it. Those I could discount. Grief softens, memory edits, and people find meaning in hindsight. But she wasn’t in hindsight. She was still in the pain. And she sounded like that.
I didn’t know what to do with her. Was she delusional, or did she genuinely feel this way?
That confusion was the crack.
By then my relationship with God, if it could be called that, was complicated. I was angry. He hadn’t answered the prayers I’d prayed when I needed Him most. And there was the broader question I couldn’t shake: if He was real and good, why did the world look the way it did? But underneath the anger was something harder to name. The weariness of feeling like you are still paying for something God has supposedly already forgiven. Still in the consequences. Still carrying the weight. The accounts were settled, or so I had been told. Nothing felt settled.
But this woman on my feed didn’t fit any of it.
So in April 2024 I did something I would not have predicted: I bought a Bible and decided to read it cover to cover for one purpose only. Not as devotion or discipline. I wanted to find out, once and for all, who this God actually was.
This series is one of its fruits.
Practices Rooted is a 25-part series on Christian disciplines, grounded in the conviction that practice flows from knowing God rather than earning His approval.