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Inscription: Writing God’s Words on Our Hearts & Minds
Part 65: Driven by Love in Malachi
Malachi 1:1-3
January 29, 2012
Prep:
~* LO
Scripture reading: Mal.
1:6-8
Malachi is the last book of the OT in Christian Bible.
In a few weeks we will start in Acts and finish the rest of the NT.
Prayer
A LOVE PROBLEM
I am always impressed by how much the OT applies to our everyday lives ones we see through the context.
Some of the problems in Malachi are familiar: Divorce, spiritual doubts, not tithing.
Some of them are not: Marrying foreigners, animal sacrifices, oppressing the poor.
~* But all of them are driven by a surprising root issue, one that affects most people in this room.
The background: Judah had been exiled and now returned.
They had started off well, rebuilding the temple and excited, but over time their enthusiasm waned.
~* More and more they were going through the motions and kind of doing the right things, but not really caring.
God responds through a question and answer session between God and his people dealing with a host of symptoms, but it is the leading question that strikes at the heart of the matter.
Malachi 1:1-2a An oracle: The word of the LORD to Israel through Malachi. 2 “I have loved you,” says the LORD.
“But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?’...
Q What is the big issue here?
Think very carefully about that because it is very important.
As we talk about all of the problems in Malachi, it would be very easy to see that they are all driven Israel’s lack of love for God, which is true, but this opening question drives to an even deeper problem:
~* Israel doubts God’s love for them.
Q Does that describe you?
LOVE DRIVES OBEDIENCE, HIS LOVE DRIVES OUR LOVE
Malachi calls God’s people to wholehearted obedience, but there are three layers to that:
1.
At the top is wholehearted obedience.
2. Wholehearted obedience is driven by love for God.
Obedience should be driven by two things: Joy and Love.
We have talked a lot about joy in the “Radically Normal” series.
But let’s look at love; this is why the greatest command isn’t one of the 10 Commandments:
Matthew 22:37-38 37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’
38 This is the first and greatest commandment.
If we don’t reject God altogether, obedience without love will go one of two ways:
a) We will obey out of fear.
Obedience motivated by fear is bitter, joyless, corrupt obedience.
It might be perfect in execution but it is lifeless.
~* If you know legalistic people, this describes them well; but we don’t have many of them here.
b) Our obedience is half-hearted and apathetic.
This is what was happening in Malachi and what happens in many churches that successfully avoid legalism.
I was talking to a pastor at a church that emphasizes grace:
The problem with convincing people that they don’t have to do anything to earn God’s love is that they believe it!
Legalistic churches can easily be better funded and have more volunteers than grace-driven churches.
~* If you refuse to be motivated by fear but aren’t motivated by love, you won’t be very motivated.
Instead, loveless worship leads to apathetic worship.
It’s like trying to buy a Valentine’s Day card for your spouse when you are in a “bad stretch.”
The sappy ones ring hollow, and you know it and she knows it.
It’s like you need a card that say, “I said ‘til death,’ and murder’s a capital offence, so we’re stuck.”
~* So instead you just find the most generic card you can and sign your name.
The card, the dinner, and everything else can just be a routine, not driven by passion, not really caring.
And this perfectly describes Israel’s obedience in Malachi.
All of the issues it deals with are symptoms of apathetic obedience.
Maybe this describes you: You are secure in God’s love, but your obedience is halfhearted and apathetic, which means is it simply laziness, which is lovelessness.
But this doesn’t mean that we drum up love, we love God because he first loved us:
3. Our love for God is driven by God’s love for us:
1 John 4:19 We love because he first loved us.
It is not our love for God that motivates him to love us, but the other way around.
Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
This is what we mean by grace – our love for God, our obedience to him are all driven by his love for us.
We are his because he call us, because he loves us, not because we have earned it.
We get this idea that because we became Christians, God gives us grace, but that is still thinking we have to work for it.
~* BTW: Historically speaking, Calvinism was initially a response to treating faith in God as a good work.
Faith is basically not rejecting God’s grace.
It’s as if you are floating along in the middle of the Atlantic grasping a piece of wood, and a rescuer comes.
~* Faith is to stop telling the rescuer to go away, nothing more.
DOUBTING GOD’S LOVE
Q Where is Israel at in those three layers?
Israel was indeed doubting God’s love for them.
God says, “I have loved you” and they say, “How have you loved us?”
~* That is a really slap in the face; try that with your spouse or your family.
Yet it sounds too familiar.
God says “I love you.”
And you respond with “Psht, whatever, how have you loved me?”
Q And why do we respond that why?
It may be a deep seated issue, which we will hit later, but it may just be the same reason they did, they were unhappy with how God was taking care of them:
Malachi 3:13-15 13 “You have said harsh things against me,” says the LORD.
“Yet you ask, ‘What have we said against you?’ 14 “You have said, ‘It is futile to serve God.
What did we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the LORD Almighty?
In other words “We are doing everything we are supposed to, but God isn’t taking care of us.”
But the problem is (as we will see) is that they weren’t.
~* They had the rituals, but there wasn’t genuine obedience.
The irony is so often when we are suffering it is because of our sin, the foolish things we have done, but then we blame God.
Proverbs 19:3 A man’s own folly ruins his life, yet his heart rages against the LORD.
But even if it isn’t because of our sin (and sometimes it genuinely isn’t), the problem is that his idea of caring for us and ours are frequently different.
~* It’s like if your spouse were to say, “I love you” and you say, “Then why haven’t you bought me a new car?”
Apathetic obedience is pathetic obedience
The majority of the book confronts this apathetic obedience and it ends up sound all too familiar.
As we look at these three different types of apathetic obedience, we learn something else:
~* Apathetic obedience is pathetic obedience.
1. Apathetic worship
Malachi 1:8 When you bring blind animals for sacrifice, is that not wrong?
When you sacrifice crippled or diseased animals, is that not wrong?
Try offering them to your governor!
Would he be pleased with you?
Would he accept you?” says the LORD Almighty.
After our daughters were born, we had people provide meals, which was a huge blessing.
We appreciated all of it, but there were some people who went above and beyond.
I remember this one flank steak stuffed with blue cheese, pine nuts, and spinach.
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