“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices,
As in obeying the voice of the Lord?
Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice,
And to heed than the fat of rams.”

Faith and good works

This verse captures the age-old opposition between salvation by faith and good works.
Here, the good works are making sacrifices to God under the ceremonial Law of the Old Testament.
And faith is shown as knowing the voice of the Lord and obeying it. That requires a personal relationship with God of trust and obedience, of having a heart right with God that automatically wants to know and do his will.

Bible references

This theme of God not wanting sacrifice from people whose heart is not with him is repeated many times in the bible:
Proverbs 21:3, “To do righteousness and justice Is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.”
Psalm 51:16-17, “For You do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it; You do not delight in burnt offering. 17 The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, A broken and a contrite heart— These, O God, You will not despise.”
Micah 6:6-8, “Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, … And what does the Lord require of you But to do justly, To love mercy, And to walk humbly with your God?“
Hosea 6:6, “For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, And the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings.”

The tendency of fallen mankind is to resort to good works and the Law, because that allows us to give only an outward or partial commitment to God, to go through the external motions of worship, and then pursue our own desires. Mankind is expert in learning how to misuse the Law for its own purposes, like Saul in this section, and I can think of two modern applications.

An inner heart for God

Firstly, it’s easy for us too, to go through the outward motions of worship and say the right things of a Sunday, and then for the rest of the week to pursue greed and all our other worldly gods. Members of my bible study group who are from the south of the US say it’s surprisingly difficult to find a church there, although there are many, because it’s the done thing; everybody goes as it’s expected, and you find all sorts of business deals and social stuff going on with no inner heart for God.

Second, I think that as our modern society has mainly turned away from God, it has fallen to the modern disease of “moral vanity gestures” or “virtue signalling”. For when people reject God’s gift of salvation in Jesus, they are left with a deep sense of their own sin, and they try to compensate by performing acts of conspicuous good works to convince others of their goodness. But it’s never enough to convince themselves, and it can lead to the extremes of false and pretentious behaviours in complying with the latest correct word phrases. But that is self-serving behaviour, it takes people further away from God and only increases their state of sin, it doesn’t lead them to do His will.

We can only be made right before God through Jesus, and only by knowing Him will we know the good work He has planned for us to do.