The corrective to purely external worship is not to just swing the other way, where you just need to have more heart in everything. God wants your heart, but that doesn’t mean that as long as your heart is in the right place, God will be pleased. Wasn’t Micah’s heart in the right place? Yes. But he did what was right in his own eyes. The fact is, God has instruction that must be followed, also and especially in worship. He wants us to have heartfelt delight in worshipping him in the way that is pleasing to him.
1 There was a man of the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Micah.