Growing up in a Christian home and serving in various church activities all my life, I have heard my fair share of “God delights in mercy, not sacrifice” quotes. A leader usually shares this sentiment right before everyone is about to serve overtime in some big event or a draining ministry endeavor, just to remind us all that our laborious sacrifice is not what pleases God.

Just remember, God isn’t satisfied because of what we can offer him… Now go and overextend yourself for God’s sake, even though that’s not what makes Him happy.

Literally every VBS, this is what someone was saying during the prayer huddle before we’d start. Obviously, I don’t disagree with the truth of scripture, and I do not contend with the heart attitude behind the use (and often misuse) of these scriptures. We are encouraged all over the bible to minister to the heart of God and to expand the borders of the kingdom of God by spreading the gospel, and this requires effort, time, and resources. The goal in sharing these verses is to encourage those who are putting a lot of effort into serving for the kingdom to remember that God is more interested in our private heart attitude to love and submit to Him than He is about what we will do for Him.

I’m concerned, however, that passages of scripture like these, specifically Psalm 51:16, “You will not delight in sacrifice, or I would give it,” and 1 Samuel 15:22, “Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the LORD?” have been applied to our current situations so often that we might miss the bigger picture behind why sacrifice does not appeal to God. To discover the why behind that bigger picture, I’m going to look to Genesis, because just like the name implies, so many things start in Genesis.

In Genesis 2:15, after God has created this beautiful and good world, scripture says that God made man and “put” him in the garden in the east to “work it and keep it” (ESV). However, there have been some issues in how this has been translated over the years. Many people assume that work was created by God as a good thing because before Adam and Eve sinned they are given instructions to work the earth and take care of it. This doesn’t really add up, however, because “work” as often used elsewhere in the Old Testament means “toil” (בְּעִצָּבוֹן֙) and that’s what it means in Genesis 3, after the sinful fall (Gen. 3:23).

We get a better translation of these words and their significance when we look further into the Old Testament. Whenever the author uses the word “put” elsewhere, he’s referring to Levites, or Israelites in general, who are ministering in the presence of God or in the tabernacle (Ex. 16:33-34; Lev. 16:23; Nu. 17:4; Deut. 26:4, 10). When Levites are ministering in the Tabernacle, they are “keeping” (וּלְשָׁמְרָֽהּ׃) and “tending” (לְעָבְדָ֖הּ) to the worship of God and the obeying of his commands in the tabernacle.

In other words, a better translation of Genesis 2:15 for our day would be,

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to worship and obey in the garden.

This is further backed up by the fact that God gives Adam a command in the very next verse,

You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.

Adam was created to worship God and obey Him. He was put in the garden so that he could be exposed to the choices of obeying God or disobeying Him, and Adam’s worship was dependent on that choice.

Here is why all of this is significant—Your labor for God, as good as it is, will always be something you do because we live in a broken world marred by sin and pain. Your worship of God is something you can do that is intrinsic to your pre-sin design. Before sin, you were called to worship and obey God. It is the only thing you can do in your relationship with God that aligns with God’s perfect design for you, and thanks to Christ, you’re allowed to do it again freely, in His presence.

You will always have to work and sacrifice in this life. The reality of this world where God is moving but has not yet perfected this space is that everything we do requires expending ourselves in difficult ways. But your worship, which predates toil, will always be more pleasing to God because it is what God made you to do without sin, without toil, and without sacrifice.

“To obey is better than sacrifice” (1 Sam 15:22) because if Adam had obeyed, there would be no need for sacrifice. Your sacrifice is required because of a lack of obedience. At the heart of genuine worship is obedience to the will and glory of God. He delights in obedience, and He delights in our worship. Don’t separate those two things. The biblical authors joined them together for a reason.