The Ultimate Sacrifice is Obedience?

1The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the LORD;
He turns it wherever He wishes.
2Every man's way is right in his own eyes,
But the LORD weighs the hearts.
3To do righteousness and justice
Is desired by the LORD more than sacrifice. Proverbs 21:1-3

Read Micah 6:8 along with this verse. Righteousness and justice are what the Lord requires of us; they are His commands to us. Another reading of Proverbs 21:3 would say, then, that obedience is desired by the Lord more than sacrifice. I feel compelled to begin defining justice, mercy, and righteousness; but I want to look at what obedience is in comparison to sacrifice. If you truly consider the idea, obedience requires sacrifice. It begins by sacrificing our own will to that of God. It may even require us to sacrifice other things, from our pride to our very life. So why is a distinction important? The answer is that we often sacrifice without any thought that we are obeying. Conversely, when we follow Christ and obey Him continually, we begin to think that the sacrifice is actually when we disobey: we sacrifice that precious relationship.
First of all, our world is full of people that make sacrifices. People quit smoking, they leave home and job, they save up for certain things, adopt children from impoverished nations, etc. The list of sacrifices that are made daily could go on and on. Many of them aren't even connected to our relationship with the Almighty. The majority of the sacrifices that we make, though, are made in order to appease the god of our selfishness in some way. We quit smoking for our health, we save to get the house or car or whatever, and we leave home and job for something we want. This isn't a sin or anything, but the more we sacrifice to this god of self, the stronger it becomes. We risk becoming a slave to our own desires. God knows this, and as such, He wants us to listen to His words and obey them, turning away from the danger and into His refuge.
This leads to the second point: continual obedience draws us nearer to God, closer to Christlikeness. The closer we get to Him, the more we want Him. Our Lord becomes more valuable than anything else and the loss of even our life becomes nothing in comparison to just being in His presence. His greatest command was to love Him. The second was to love others as we love ourselves. Jesus told us that doing this would cause us to fulfill the rest of the law as well. As such, we have given God what He desires: obedience. It is when we reach this point that we discover the only true sacrifice is separation from Christ, and God made that sacrifice so that we don't have to. He forsook His son on the cross. Paul implied this idea that loss of anything is nothing compared to knowing Christ. Without the truth that Christ is the most valuable thing ever, we would have no hope, no salvation, and no life.
In summation, God desires obedience. Obedience takes us to a place where we no longer have to sacrifice, because the only loss is the loss of our divine relationship.