In this sermon, Pastor Babij continues looking at the topic of declining love for Jesus, this time from the book of Malachi. After discussing the historical background of Malachi, Pastor Babij examines six evidences of declining love in Israel so that we also might examine ourselves.
Full Transcript:
This morning you should be turning to Malachi, and if you don’t know where that is, that’s the last book of the Old Testament, right before Matthew. That’s where I’m heading this morning. This is the second message of three messages springing from the passage in the epistle of Jude verse 21, keep yourselves in the love of God. And this passage emphasizes the Christian’s responsibility that if we indeed are called by God in verse one of Jude 1, and if indeed we are beloved by God, and if indeed we are being kept for Jesus Christ, then to us this word applies, keep yourselves in the love of God, which really puts us in the sphere of personal responsibility. Being in His love, you should not become careless, but remember that you are responsible. We must really rest upon the fact that God’s love is unsought, it is undeserved, it is unconditional. We cannot in this life put ourselves outside the love of God, and I’m speaking of course to real, genuine believers. However far someone may fall or drift away or wander or even wound Him or grieve His Spirit, you have not made Him cease to love you. It is we who have moved out of His love and it’s not Him who has moved at all. You may have forgotten Him, but God has never ceased to love you. So quite simply, to keep yourselves in the love of God means to keep yourself from all that is unlike Him, from all that which violates His love and grieves the heart of God.
So I fear, I really do fear that the church of God is full of people who have wandered out of God’s love. What do I mean by that? By their own conception or their transformed thinking is not there, their obedient doing or their conduct is not in line with adorning the gospel and their character, their sanctified being is not where it ought to be. They have fallen not out of His love, but from fellowship as it fulfills His will, as it manifests His purpose, as it accomplishes His work in the world. So instead of the manifestations of the graces and the glories of the Christian life shining through someone’s life, when they step away from keeping themselves in the love of God, they lose the freshness of being a Christian and that’s where the declining process begins, right there. And all will agree surely that our greatest lack as children of God and our deepest need as children of God is love.
First and foremost, we need love for God. We have to start there. And this is the greatest commandment which we read this morning. Jesus says, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. Who can claim that? But that’s where God’s bringing us. Everything in our Christian lives on our part depends on our personal love for Jesus Christ and our growth in that love. And of course, we love Him because He first loved us. It wasn’t the other way around. We did not love God. So this is an all-mastering passion of love for Jesus I’m talking about. So that you and I will be willing out of love for Him to trust Him utterly, to obey Him absolutely. This is our first need, a real love for Jesus.
I was reading about this stuff and I ran across a little story of a Chinese lady who went over to England many years ago in order to take back to China a band of British women who could teach the Chinese women about Jesus. She went up and down Britain, but the response was very disappointing. One day her servant came to her room and found her sobbing bitterly, and the Chinese lady said this to her servant, it’s no good. We shall have to go back without them. They do not love their Jesus enough. That’s it. That is the goal of the Christian life. We do not love our Lord Jesus enough to be willing for His sake to trust and obey Him for all He has in Himself for us. We miss out on it.
So the claim to love must also be tested as to its source. Someone can claim to love and have the wrong source. But if the source is wrong, then the love, it’s not love at all. It’s something else. It’s false love. It’s actually the love the world has. It’s not God’s love. This kind of love has the same source as false doctrine and false teachers, and God must reject that kind of love. It was old Warren Worsby who said, he’s with the Lord now, he said, much that is called love in our modern society bears no resemblance or relationship to the holy spiritual love of God.
So Christian love is a special kind of love. It is the kind of love that has its source in God Himself. It cannot be had unless one has come to know Jesus as their Lord and Savior and the Holy Spirit of God indwells them. Scripture tells us in Romans 5:5,
and hope does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured out within our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.
That means love is a gift of the Holy Spirit, and as this passage of Scripture says in Romans, the love of God is in the heart of every true believer. It’s already there. It’s almost unbelievable, is it not? Knowing the love of God as we do from Scripture and knowing our hearts as we do. If it were not for the word of God, we could hardly believe this is true. The love of God, higher than the highest heaven, deeper than the deepest sea, the very love of God, eternal, infinite, the love of God that was manifested on Calvary’s cross in the darkest of those three hours, the very love of God is shed abroad in our little, mean, sin-stained, selfish hearts. That’s impossible unless God’s done something. When the Holy Spirit comes to take up residence in our born-again hearts, He brought the very love of God there with Him. The very love of God has been planted by the Holy Spirit in every Christian’s heart.
But every new plant, if it is to bear fruit, must be cultivated, and this is where we fail. The tragedy of every backslidden Christian and for every Christian declining in love for Jesus, we fail right here. The tragedy of the despair that may be in our hearts is not that you don’t love Jesus. You have the love of God in your heart already if you have the Spirit of God. The tragedy is uncultivated love. Somewhere down the line, we stop cultivating our love. for God. But that happens in relationships too, in marriages too. Matter of fact, there’s many similarities between a marriage of a husband and wife and our love for God in Scripture, because it’s the same. We can get married, we can be full of zeal for our marriage, and then one year goes by, 10 years go by, 20 years go by, and you end up getting cold. And then what happens? You’re in trouble if you don’t cultivate that love, right? That’s what happens.
So I’m speaking this morning about the sad state of declining love. Love turned cold. It is when there’s no passion or heart in your service, just cold orthodoxy, just going through the motions, which is hypocrisy. So declining in love toward God is the forerunner of hypocrisy, of spiritual apathy, which then leads down this path of caring more for the world, falling victim to the culture, turning to empty worldly pursuits that you deem good, which naturally leads to compromise with evil, corruption, and finally to a decline in your relationship with God.
Last week I ended with the three precautions for backsliding. And the first one was walking in integrity. That means you’re remaining obedient. Secondly, was trusting in the Lord. That means you’re growing in your faith. And then the third one was keeping in the love of God, continuing to cultivate love for Christ. So if we cannot always discern that we are sliding into a state of declining love, who can show us that we’re in that state? Who cares enough to bring it to our attention when we cannot see it ourselves? Who is the one who can expose declining love when we cannot detect it in ourselves? Yes, the answer is quite obvious. It is our great loving Lord that searches the heart and exposes the real conditions of our heart through the word of God, He does that.
So in order to get a good glimpse into the backslidden condition of God’s people, especially in their heart, and how the Lord exposes their spiritual condition, we must turn in our Bibles to the last book of the Old Testament, and that’s Malachi. But before I get there, while you’re turning, I do have to give you some background to this book, because when it comes to the Old Testament, many people don’t know what’s going on. Some historical background is needed in order to get a glimpse, a sense of what the prophet Malachi’s task was with the souls in which he had to deal with in his day, not much different than our day. Matter of fact, no difference at all. There were three post-exilic prophets, and that means that after the Babylonian captivity, that 70 years that they were in captivity, now they’re coming out of that, and there’s three prophets – Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. Malachi, being the last word from the Lord’s prophets before God would no longer speak to a prophet for 400 years until John the Baptist.
So here’s some of the timing. In 539, a decree from Cyrus was issued to allow the Jews to return back to Jerusalem, and the dates get smaller as it gets closer to the time Christ comes. 516, the temple is built. The decree of Cyrus comes to rebuild that temple, but because of much opposition, it was stopped for 15 to 16 years, as recorded in Ezra. In fact, this is what Ezra said, then the work of the house in Jerusalem ceased, and it was stopped until the second year of the reign of Darius, king of Persia. So in the second year of Darius, Haggai and Zechariah come and are building the temple. They are moving the people to get the city of Jerusalem up and running and to get the holy house of God, the temple built and everything functioning so that the people of God could be revived from their spiritual lethargy after being in captivity, after the Babylonian exile. And of course, to get the worship once again before their God, that the zeal of the Lord would be ignited once more amongst God’s people. Well, it did get ignited, but it was only for a brief season that spiritual life and earnestness and joy was amongst the people. They built the sacred courts with zeal and enthusiasm. The priests offered sacrifices anew and made intercession for the citizens within God’s holy house, but this seeming spiritual revival and restoration was short-lived.
What happened then? They moved away from God. They didn’t manifest zeal and devotion and worship anymore. They left a good part of building in the city incomplete and in ruins. The people took no delight in the temple, which their fathers had raised. Temple services fell into dishonor and neglect. They withheld from God those tithes and offerings which pertain to Him. Their animal sacrifices were the very poorest of the flock. The priest did a careless job to meet the qualifications of the priest and then also the responsibilities of their office. And then the priest and the people intermarried freely with foreigners who were strangers to the commonwealth and the covenant and were of course idolatrous in worship and sinful in lifestyle, all recorded in Ezra, all of it. So by 458, 459, Ezra returns to Jerusalem and finds the condition and the affairs absolutely appalling. When he learned the full extent of their evil, he tore his clothes, pulled out his beard, sank to the ground a whole day, the word of God says, and he did that because he realized the people had broken faith with God.
And then in 445, 14, 15 years later, Nehemiah shows up. He returns to Jerusalem and again, the fortifications of the towns were raised from their ruins. The Levitical priest and the singers resumed their duties in the sacred courts. The gates were closed against any merchants who would come and try to make a profit on the Sabbath day. And it seemed again, under the leadership of Nehemiah, a genuine revival of a permanent kind would be brought about. But you know what happened? Nehemiah had a return for a short period of time back to Artaxerxes, the king. He wasn’t gone that long, just a brief interval, and the Jews reverted back to their old misdemeanors and sins and that was a sad relapse.
Well, who steps on the scene at that point? I don’t know if you want that job and to be that prophet – well, that’s Malachi. Malachi had a tough task. He had to carry the burden of the word of the Lord to this group of people. Almost an entire century had passed since Haggai and Zechariah began to preach in Jerusalem to the captives who returned from Babylon. In fact, between 430 and 425, the second temple has been finished long since. And here in Malachi, they are long finished with the temple and most of the work. It has been 75 to 100 years Since its completion, the priests have been ministering, the people have been worshiping in the temple for a long time.
But here’s the problem, and this is always the problem. There’s no pressure. There’s no invasion. There’s no crisis. This will sound strange, but there is a non-crisis crisis. In other words, the crisis is nothing’s happening. There’s no wall to be built. There’s no temple to be built. There’s nothing to be done. Everything’s working. All there is to do is to carry out the work of God that’s already been established. Now, that’s a good thing. However, it could be very deadly, too, especially if it is not accompanied by examination, by searching the heart. We have the Lord’s table. One of the things about the Lord’s table is you examine yourself, see how you’re doing spiritually, with God, with people, with your relationship. Have you drifted from the love of God? That’s why it’s there. So the crisis of regularity without examination is often a deadly thing. And why is that? Because it often leads to hypocrisy and declining love. Still going and doing everything I know to do, but nothing in my heart. My heart is cold. God hates that. We should hate that, too. The Lord is never pleased with hypocrisy.
And here in Malachi, God is not pleased with the people at all. They were declining in love to God, and it was time for the Lord to step in and expose their hearts through his prophet Malachi. And I want you to notice in chapter 1, in verse 10, what it says. God calls for his people to stop being faithless and backslidden. In verse number 10 of chapter 1, it says,
“Oh that there were one among you who would shut the gates, that you might not uselessly kindle fire on My altar! I am not pleased with you,” says the Lord of hosts, “nor will I accept an offering from you.
See, the Lord is saying to them, listen, your hearts are cold and numb. I wish somebody would just shut the gates of Jerusalem so nobody can come in because your worship is all wrong, and it’s not what I’m pleased with. See, this message is for us today. Same thing could happen. You’re a Christian for a long time. You’ve been going to church your whole life. You’ve been involved with theology and reading the word of God and all those things, and all those things are good, and we ought to be doing them. They are the disciplines of the Christian life, but at the same time, you can drift away. So if you notice in these passages of Scriptures that I’m going to look at, how it reveals their numbness. From the top down, they are oblivious to their spiritual condition, they’re unaware that God was not pleased with them. All the prophets warned them to stop their wicked ways and return and repent, but a long time has passed since a prophet spoke, and people took on the ways of the world while still practicing their religious rituals. It’s been a long time since a prophet warned them and admonished them to stop, to look at their hearts, to see how they’re doing spiritually, and to come and to return and remember and repent.
Look at verse number two of chapter one. I want you to notice the first thing the Lord brings up. Look what it says in verse number two,
“I have loved you,” says the Lord. But you say, “How have You loved us?”
And then in chapter one, verse six, God says to them, you despise my name. It says in verse six,
“‘A son honors his father, and a servant his master. Then if I am a father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My respect?’ says the Lord of hosts to you, O priests who despise My name. But you say, ‘How have we despised Your name?’
Chapter two, verse number 10. God says to them, you have dealt treacherously with each other. Notice what it says. It says,
“Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother so as to profane the covenant of our fathers?
And of course, they say, what do you mean? We think we’re doing all right. We’re doing everything we should be doing. Look at verse 17 of chapter two. God says to them, you weary me with your words. It says,
You have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you say, “How have we wearied Him?”
A lot of words, no heart. Look at verse number eight of chapter three. God says to them, you robbed me. It says,
“Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me! But you say, ‘How have we robbed You?’
And then in chapter three, verse 13, God says to them, you have spoken arrogantly and harshly against me. In verse 13, it says,
“Your words have been arrogant against Me,” says the Lord. “Yet you say, ‘What have we spoken against You?’
So you see, the people have no idea about their own condition. That is a deadly place to be. You keep going to church, you keep having devotions, and you should do those things, but the deadly thing is when you get numb doing those things. Outwardly, things are in order, but inwardly, you’re not right with God. And you’re not off doing some gross sin. Your heart’s not right. See, the Lord, through the prophet, gets to the heart of the matter and exposes their hypocrisy and declining love. Malachi is really a message that will help us to identify hypocrisy and declining love and hopefully keep us from drifting into cold formality and will motivate us, should motivate us, to continue to cultivate our love for our Lord Jesus Christ. Outward form, inward numbness was the spiritual diagnosis of the day. The people had a deep spiritual heart problem, yet their response to God when the prophet confronts them, we don’t know what you’re talking about. The priest and the people cannot assess their own spiritual condition.
Now I want you to look with me this morning at Malachi again and just look at the wonder, the wonder of how God gets at it. He doesn’t hit the outside of the heart. He hits the inside of the heart. He, in a sense, cracks the shell by an indirect address and gives a bold statement provoking a response on the part of the people and hits the problem right square where it ought to be hit. The hammer hits the nail right where it ought to be. So there are six things God sees in their heart that has gone wrong. Now these six things God sees in their heart are six issues that God wants to deal with. And when anyone will slip and just walk along in their Christian walk and not cultivate their love for Jesus Christ and the heart will get cool and you get used to things, at that point you really need to watch out. When you become hypocritical and cold-hearted, six things will appear and may not all appear at the same time. Not all of them may appear. One of them may appear. But that should be enough for us to examine ourselves. See, there’s a large amount of danger of just saying words. We can sing worship songs. We can pray. We can just do ministry or just going to worship, listening to preaching or just going through the motions. The very thing we ought to hate more than anything else is to slip into a spiritual numb, cold-hearted condition. To have a deep spiritual problem and not being aware of it is a very deadly thing. It must be identified. It must be repented of, and it must be avoided.
So the six things, I’m going to go back over them, six things I already mentioned, but I want to look at them briefly. Regularity in the Christian life is good and normal, but it must be accompanied always by examination. And examination will keep you hedging against hypocrisy and declining love. And so let’s look back at the first question in chapter 1, verse 2 to 5, where he says this,
“I have loved you,” says the Lord. But you say, “How have You loved us?” “Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” declares the Lord. “Yet I have loved Jacob; but I have hated Esau, and I have made his mountains a desolation and appointed his inheritance for the jackals of the wilderness.”
And what basically He’s saying there is, I love you, Israel, and I still love you. Even in your condition right now, I still love you. He wanted to make sure they knew that right off the bat. But you know what? They’re not sure God loves them. Anymore, they seem to have lost their activity of God’s love and the experimental nature of God’s love in their own personal life.
So questioning the love of God is the first thing that we start to do when we start moving into hypocrisy and declining love. If God loves me, then why, Lord, is this happening in my life? Why did you make me like this? Why did I get this disease? Why do I have these family problems? Why haven’t You answered my prayer when I prayed? Why did You allow this and not allow that? Why did You put me here? Why was I born now? And the questions go on and on and on. So you see, when your heart begins to grow cold, you will start questioning the love of God. You may not express it in spoken words, but you begin to think it. My friends, this is the first step toward hypocrisy and declining love. You stop cultivating love toward God by not remembering what God has done for you. You forget the gospel.
A second thing is that they begin to despise the name of God. And I want you to notice specifically in verse number 6, it says,
“‘A son honors his father, and a servant his master. Then if I am a father, where is My honor? And if I am a master, where is My respect?’ says the Lord of hosts to you,
And he’s specifically identifying the leadership, the priest who despised my name. And they are saying, where have we despised your name? So this is an indirect question towards the priest and those going into full-time Christian work, if I can say it like that, or are handling the things of God professionally every day. But in a very real sense, all Christians are priests. We minister for God in our homes, in our schools, on our jobs, on our teams, in our church body. Peter even says that we are a royal priesthood. So the priests were ministering. People were ministering, but they were ministering in a way that despised God’s name. In other words, another word to say that is they were ignoring God. They weren’t giving God respect. They were despising His name. How were they doing that? Look at verse number 7 in Malachi chapter 1,
You are presenting defiled food upon My altar. But you say, ‘How have we defiled You?’ In that you say, ‘The table of the Lord is to be despised.’
And then in verse number 13 of chapter 1,
You also say, ‘My, how tiresome it is!’ And you disdainfully sniff at it,” says the Lord of hosts, “and you bring what was taken by robbery and what is lame or sick; so you bring the offering! Should I receive that from your hand?” says the Lord.
You wouldn’t even do that to the Persian king and you’re going to do it to me. In other words, they were presenting defiled food on the altar, animals upon the altar, saying, hey listen, two lambs keep one, burn one. If it’s just going to burn up, why waste that? They were very pragmatic in their worship. Instead, they were bringing despicable and worthless sacrifice to God. They seem to imagine any food offering, an animal, was good enough for God, whether it was blind or diseased or lame or whatever it may be. In that way, they were defiling God. In other words, they were giving sloppy things to God. They weren’t treating the Christian life with any kind of decorum and respect for God, for what He’s done for them. In other words, holiness and godliness was not there. Tired of hearing the word of God. Tired of serving. Tired to hear long preaching. See, those are most guilty who have the most access to the things of God. And who has more access to the things of God than the pastors and the missionaries and the people of God?
See, when your heart grows cold, you’ll start ignoring the Lord and the things of the Lord, and gradually you’ll become sloppy in your Christian walk. You’ll take for granted a lot of things. Your church attendance may go off because you do this. I listened to two sermons this week, I don’t have to go to church. Instead of leading people to the Lord, you will have no spiritual direction for yourself, let alone someone else. And my friends, this is the second thing to look for in order to hedge against hypocrisy and declining love.
A third thing found in Malachi chapter 2, verse number 10, it says, they have dealt treacherously with each other. Another way to say that is that you stab each other in the back. When there’s no enemy, you make each other enemies. But they say, what do you mean? In chapter 2, verse 10,
“Do we not all have one father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously each against his brother so as to profane the covenant of our fathers?
Why do you break faith with one another, lie to one another, manipulate one another, not care for one another. And he goes on to talk about the marriage relationship, actually, in chapter 2 verses 14 and 15. It says this,
Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the Lord has been a witness between you and the wife of your youth, against whom you have dealt treacherously, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. But not one has done so who has a remnant of the Spirit. And what did that one do while he was seeking a godly offspring? Take heed then to your spirit, and let no one deal treacherously against the wife of your youth.
Now, what’s going on here? The treachery being referred to specifically is the priest and the people are intermarrying freely with foreigners who were strangers to the commonwealth and the covenant and were bringing idolatrous worship and sinful lifestyles into the nation. See, finding wives among the Hebrew women was God’s will for Israel, but not considering that important by the men, the poor forsaken Jewish women were being set aside and deprived, really, of their place in the nation and their Hebrew homes in order that outsiders may step into their prerogative and to their privileges, that was how they dealt treacherously against the women. In other words, they were divorcing the Hebrew wives to take foreign women. And everything was all right with them. The priests were doing it. Now that’s where Ezra began to tear out his beer and his hair and put on sackcloth and sat all day mourning over that particular sin. So those men who were wedded to these heathen women endangered the whole nation with a polytheistic worship where Molech and Chemosh and Baal were reverenced instead of Yahweh. These practices were bringing everything down to a common earthly level to the holy people of God, whom God loved. That’s why He’s exposing their hearts. It also was destroying the barriers that the nation of Israel had against the ungodly world.
So what happens? When the heart gets cold, you’ll start looking around. The sin of intermarriage with unbelievers, contracting really wedlock with the daughters of a strange God. Now we can also have a whole message on why Christians should marry real Christians and how people that are married should stay married. That’s a whole other thing. So when the heart gets cold with God, you’ll start breaking faith with him and with your spouse. You go through the motions of worshiping and showing your love to God and then break faith with someone that is in a covenant relationship with you. And that’s what marriage is before God. That’s why it says in Malachi 2:16, look what it says,
For I hate divorce,” says the Lord, the God of Israel, “and him who covers his garment with wrong,” says the Lord of hosts. “So take heed to your spirit, that you do not deal treacherously.”
God really says I hate when relationships become sour and backbiting and you end up being unfaithful to each other. So see, when the heart grows cold with God, you will start looking for something else to fill your heart. You cannot leave a void. There is no such thing as a vacuum, a spiritual vacuum. You will look for something else. And we all have to really realize that Satan is right there to provide you everything you need. And the world’s there to accommodate him. And you still have sinful remaining corruption in your own flesh from your past that you’re dragging around and overcoming and putting to death as you’re being sanctified. But you’ll just start being unfaithful toward the Lord and you’ll be unfaithful to others. You’ll be unfaithful to the work of God. My friends, this is the third thing to look for in order to hedge against hypocrisy and declining love.
And then there is a fourth thing. Malachi 2:17, it says,
You have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you say, “How have we wearied Him?” In that you say, “Everyone who does evil is good in the sight of the Lord, and He delights in them,” or, “Where is the God of justice?”
You see what the people are saying? The people are attributing evil to God and injustice to God. You see how now their view of God is completely misaligned with Scripture. And they say this because they see the evil people prosper. Isn’t it Psalm 73 that has a lot to say about this? I think it’s Psalm 73. The evil people prosper. It seems like they have all the money. Look at my grass. It’s all brown and my neighbor’s grass is all green. Oh, they got the latest car and I’m driving this old jalopy. You know, it’s funny, but it’s exactly what happens. So God blesses the wicked and not the godly man. That’s their conclusion. You drift away from God, you’ll begin to think just like that. So when your heart gets cold, you’ll begin to say all this. God’s not just. I’m not being blessed like those around me. Complaining that you are less blessed than the wicked person. And my friend, this is the fourth thing to look for in order to hedge against hypocrisy and declining love.
And then a fifth thing in Malachi 3:8,
Will a man rob God? Yet you are robbing Me! But you say, ‘How have we robbed You?’
In verse 9, it says,
You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing Me, the whole nation of you! Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse,
Let me just stop there for a minute. What are they doing here? That when your heart gets cold and things get tight, you begin to hold back your giving. Giving is a spiritual matter. It’s a matter of worship. It’s not just a word on tithing and giving, but a word on your heart attitude in connection with your material possessions that God’s blessed you with. Everything you have is because God’s given it to you. And every day we should wake up and thank God for whatever you have that God’s given it to you. The Lord loves a cheerful giver, doesn’t He not? But what if you’re not cheerful? What if you begrudge God your best and instead your giving is a wearisome burden to God. They have to crank your fingers just to give a few cents to God. God doesn’t need your money, but he wants your heart and he wants all of it. And if your heart’s with God, you don’t have to worry about the giving because you’ll give to the Lord because you will be so filled with the abundance of God’s love and how you didn’t deserve anything He gave you. And so what happens is that your pockets get loosed up and you give because you know that God’s given you way more than you can give Him, right? That’s what happens.
So do you faithfully practice giving as worship? You may say, well, I can’t give, I’m broke. Yet you find ways to buy things you want. Don’t say I can’t afford to give. Remember, you can’t afford not to give. You heard that before, because giving is practical worship. It’s showing God your gratitude. But when your heart grows cold, you’ll stop becoming generous. And you will stop trusting God for the supply of your needs. You will say, you did it. I made this money. I have these things. No, you don’t. It’s not about you. It’s about what God gives. And He is a gracious giver. He gave His Son for us. So this is a fifth thing that you look for in order to hedge against hypocrisy.
But notice the challenge in verse number 10 of chapter three. Here’s the challenge,
Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in My house, and test Me now in this,” says the Lord of hosts, “if I will not open for you the windows of heaven and pour out for you a blessing until it overflows.
He’s challenging them while He’s exposing their heart. And He says, listen, get back to this. And believe me, you pray to Me and I’ll answer you because you’re My people. And I’ll bless you because you’re My people.
But here’s the last one this morning. Number six, which is the deadliest of all. And what is that? When you speak arrogantly against the Lord. Look at chapter three, verse number 13. It says,
“Your words have been arrogant against Me,” says the Lord. “Yet you say, ‘What have we spoken against You?’ You have said, ‘It is vain to serve God; and what profit is it that we have kept His charge, and that we have walked in mourning before the Lord of hosts?
In other words, they conclude this, it’s pointless to serve God. That’s pretty deadly, isn’t it? When you see somebody who was supposed to be a Christian walk away from God after knowing a lot of the word of God, after being under messages of the word of God, and just walk away and says, ah, that’s a bunch of fooey. What they are saying is that it looks like it’s more profitable out there in the world than it is to serve God. And so they say it’s pointless. Look at verse 15,
So now we call the arrogant blessed; not only are the doers of wickedness built up but they also test God and escape.’”
They blaspheme God, and it doesn’t seem like anything’s happening to them. They live a good life, have a peaceful death, and go off into eternity. It looks pretty good. And we begin to think, you know, sports figures look pretty, it’s something I would like to be blessed like, or politicians, or celebrities, media personalities, people who are rich and privileged, they’re the ones that look like they’re being blessed. And then people conclude, I don’t really get any honor or recognition or status serving the Lord. If I want recognition, it looks like I shouldn’t serve the Lord and do this other thing. Now, when you think about this, this is the prophet speaking to the nation of Israel, exposing their heart. Hypocrisy and declining love is not pretty when it’s exposed. But it should drive you to remember, to repent, and to return to God with a heart that is cultivating and nourishing love for Christ.
And why is that? You know why that is? Because it’s worth it to serve God. It is worth it to live for Him with their whole heart, all your mind, all your soul, all your strength. It’s worth it to serve God. In fact, look at what it says, and here’s kind of the dessert in Malachi. In chapter 3, verse 16 through 18, this is what it says. You know what? God has a book of remembrance. He knows everything going on in your life as a believer. And look at what it says in verse number 16,
Then those who feared the Lord spoke to one another, and the Lord gave attention and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before Him for those who fear the Lord and who esteem His name. “They will be Mine,” says the Lord of hosts, “on the day that I prepare My own possession, and I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him.” So you will again distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve Him.
That is the admonition in Malachi. Listen, it’s worth it to serve God because God knows everything going on in your life, and so every little thing you do that is in His name, He knows all about it. It doesn’t have to be published. Nobody has to know about it. It doesn’t have to be in Time magazine or on the internet or on some YouTube channel. God knows. If you live your life like that, you don’t have to worry about anything. See, God knows all your service and the quality of your works. And then in chapter 4, verse number 1, He will reward you someday. It says in chapter 4, verse 1,
“For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze,” says the Lord of hosts, “so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.”
And what it’s saying there is that, listen, all the stuff that you look at and think that the evil person’s being blessed – wrong. They’re going to be judged someday, and God’s going to take care of them, and they’re going to come under the piercing judgment and examination of God, and if they don’t know Christ, they’ll be cast into the lake of fire forever. But My godly ones will not. They will be given mercy, not judgment. And then one other thing, in verses 2 and 3 of chapter 4, it says that God will show you off someday. It says,
“But for you who fear My name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall. You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing,” says the Lord of hosts.
So he has a book of remembrance. He will reward the godly and judge the wicked, and He will lift you up one day as a prized possession. So here’s the bottom line. The bottom line, it’s worth it to serve God and wait for Him. Reward may not be in its fullness now, but it will come because our Lord remembers our faithfulness. And how is He going to do that? Well, according to Malachi, what is He going to do? In Malachi chapter 4, he goes on to talk about someone’s coming who’s going to be a messenger, who’s going to lay the groundwork down for someone to come. And of course, we know he’s prophesied in Malachi, he’s prophesied in Isaiah, and that’s John the Baptist. So just get this, for 400 years after Malachi closes his prophecy, it doesn’t mean that the word of God wasn’t around. It just means God wasn’t speaking to a prophet. And then John the Baptist gets on the scene, and what’s his message? Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. In other words, all that time, the leadership of Israel didn’t get it. And John the Baptist comes and lays the groundwork, and he lays it for Jesus Christ. And his appearance is an end time event of the first magnitude because John comes on the scene as a result of divine appointment and the fulfillment of prophecy. The timing of John’s appearance was precise. John appears on the scene at a time where there was much religiosity, much political confusion, and politically and prophetically the time was ripe for the Messiah.
And what did he preach to? Who did he preach to? He preached to a society spiritually deadened and shallow. To a people who were indifferent and lackadaisical about spiritual matters, and a people affected by all kinds of subtle forms of hypocrisy. They had drifted far from love of God. And a brief search really of scripture and the religious context really exposes the current spiritual condition of the times in which he ministered. And generally, two spiritual conditions were evident during the time of John the Baptist and Jesus – religious formality. Who did Jesus have the harshest words for? Israel, the leadership of Israel. And then of course comfortable hypocrisy. It was a time of peace when Jesus came. People were comfortable. People were going through the motions. They were still going to the temple. They were still sacrificing, but they were doing it all in the spirit of the people under Malachi’s watch.
So in other words, it seems like every time there’s a revival in history, unless God is doing it, unless there is a revival of the regeneration of a human heart, where God plants His Spirit in you, there is no revival. Because revival comes from God. It comes down to us. We can’t conjure it up ourselves.
So examine yourself today. If any of these six things surface in your heart at any time in your Christian walk, start questioning the love of God. You start ignoring the things of God, being sloppy in your Christian life. You don’t serve, because you have better things you have to do. You stop being faithful, just to the simple disciplines of the Christian walk, the means of grace God’s given us to grow. You begin to complain that you are less blessed than other people. You stop being generous. As a matter of fact, you may stop giving altogether. You’ll spend that money somewhere else, thinking it’s going to fulfill that void in your heart. It will not. And then the last one is you think or say, why should I serve God? What’s in it for me? That’s deadly.
I’m going to pick it up next week in Revelation, because you say, well, that’s an Old Testament passage of Scripture, that hasn’t much to do with us today. Wrong. Because you know what it says in Revelation, right? That you left your first love, and I’m not pleased with you. And then what does he tell them? In Revelation 2:5,
Therefore remember from where you have fallen, and repent and do the deeds you did at first; or else I am coming to you and will remove your lampstand out of its place—unless you repent.
We’ll look at that next week. Let’s pray. Lord, thank You this morning. Lord, the word of God we know is a light, and it exposes the thoughts and intents of our heart. It shows us, Lord, who we really are and where we are at spiritually in our life. But Lord, at the same time, I thank You that the word of God does expose us in a way to bring us to the place that we do want to remember the great things You have done for us. We do want to have our heart warmed in our cultivation of love for You. And Lord, we do want to serve You, knowing that it is profitable to serve You, that in Your book of remembrance You know everything that’s going on. I pray, Lord, that each and every one of us would come to the place where we examine ourselves honestly and then remember, repent, and return to You. And once we do, Lord, I pray we would not want to go backward, but always go forward. And I pray this in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.