The Moody Church Sunday Morning Podcast

In this sermon, we explore the 6th and final dispute between God and the people of Israel. Previously, God was pouring out His heart in an appeal to the people to “test me in this” so that He would pour our His blessing on them, and to “return to me, and I will return to you.” But how will the people respond? In this passage from Malachi 3:13–18, the people respond in two very different ways. One group turned to one another and said it’s time we take God at His word, and repent and return to Him. The other groups turned to one another and said, what’s the point? These people doubled down on their faltering faith. This passage serves as a reminder to Israel and us that God hears our words, God discerns our hearts, and God remembers our deeds. 1) God Hears Our Words When it comes to God, nothing escapes His notice. We need a God of final justice far more than we realize. First, because the justice of God gives life meaning. And second, because the final justice of God is the grounds for non-violence. 2) God Discerns our Hearts When it comes to God, true motives are laid bare. God discerns the hearts of those filled with resentful obligation, and the hearts of those who fear and esteem His name. 3) God Remembers Our Deeds When it comes to God, all shall be brought to account. Takeaway: History has an arc, and it bends towards Jesus. One day, we will stand before Him and the books will be open. In that day, will you find your name written in the Book of Life? Malachi 3:13–18

We live in anxious times; it’s a world of worry out there. Are you struggling to sleep at night due to anxiety? Are you fearful of what may happen in the future? Psalm 127:1–2 is a beautiful reminder of how God’s beloved children can find peace from a world full of worry. In this sermon, we’ll discover that our ability to experience the peace of Christ in our lives is dependent on our ability to trust Him in all circumstances. 5 Practical takeaways for God’s beloved: how do we allow God to keep and build our lives on solid foundations? Communion with God.

Time in God’s Word.

Community with God’s people.

Seek God’s perspective.

Rest in God’s sovereignty. True rest in an anxious world is seeing the very real possibility of our worst fears right around the corner and know that the God who calls you His beloved is sovereign over it all. Psalm 127:1–2

What does the Bible say about money and possession? There are approximately 2,350 passages about those topics in Scripture. By contrast, faith and prayer receive about 500 passages each. So, the Bible talks about money and possessions more than twice as much as the topics of faith and prayer combined. Now, why would that be? In this sermon, we’re going to see why God invests so much time and energy teaching us how to have a spiritually healthy relationship with our money and our possessions. And to do so, we’ll turn to Malachi 3, to one of the classic passages on money in all the Bible. In Malachi 3:6–12, the Lord and the people go back and forth with one another in dispute. It’s quite clear in this passage that the people of God are spiritually unwell. So, we’ll approach this passage like a physician in three parts. 1) The Symptoms What are the presenting symptoms of this spiritual malady? The people were being stingy in their tithes and contributions when they come to the temple for worship. Instead of wholehearted, joyous generosity toward God, they’re withholding and tight-fisted.  And God says, “you’re robbing me!” What does God mean by tithes and contributions? Under the law, the people of Israel were required to bring north of 40% of their annual income to the Lord. (Note: if you strip away portions there were meant as a tax for the nation of Israel, the law required at a minimum 10% tithe of their annual income, 2% for the priests, and 14% for the Sabbath year, plus the value of the sacrifices. Combined, this contribution comes to around 26% of their annual income.) So, when the Israelites fell on hard times, they became stingy with God. And God says, “You’re robbing me!” Why? Because everything belongs to God; it’s all from His hand. And so, our gifts to Him are a bit ironic, because it’s all His to begin with. As much as our wealth feels like it belongs to us, the reality is God gave it—and so much more—to us. Stinginess robs God of glory, and us of grace. When we gorge ourselves on our wealth, making it all about us, we’re robbing God of glory, we’re robbing our neighbors of good, and we’re robbing ourselves of grace. Instead of the joy of partnering with God in the mending and flourishing of this world, we cave in upon ourselves, and make it all about us. In robbing God, it turns out, we’re also robbing ourselves.  2) The Disease Their stinginess toward God was symptomatic of an underlying disease: they’ve turned aside from the Lord, their hearts have wandered, their devotions has drifted, and their love has grown cold. The reason their treasure wasn’t in the Lord’s temple is because their hearts weren’t there either. Our money always shows us our hearts. Our hearts and our treasure are intertwined. 3) The Prescription Gods says to Israel that if they bring the full tithe to the storehouse (temple), He will pour out a list of blessings on them. Now, these blessings are clearly flowing out of the covenant God made with the people of Israel through Moses, where covenant obedience meant covenant blessings, and covenant disobedience meant covenant curse. We can’t claim these promises directly for ourselves or for our nation today. But, here’s a principle here we shouldn’t miss: God always blesses obedience. Not only does our treasure reveal our hearts, but our treasure also leads our hearts as well. When we invest our money into something, we begin to care about it. Our hearts follow our treasure. Do you want to grow to love God more and more? To love your neighbor as yourself? This passage tells us… Lead your heart with faith-filled, joyous, proportionate, lavish generosity. What’s a good baseline? 10% of your income is a great place to start, because it’s just high enough to make you confront your idols and self-worship. It’s just enough to get your heart moving in the right direction. Takeaway: “Return to me, and I will return to you.” Malachi 3:6–12

One the of hardest moments for those of us who are trying to live God’s way comes when those who couldn’t care less about God’s way end up coming out ahead in life. What’s the point in righteous living, if the unrighteous are the ones getting ahead in life? That’s exactly where God’s people were in Malachi’s day. They’d come back from exile with fervor and resolve to dedicate themselves to living for God. But things didn’t turn out like they’d hoped. It seemed like the ungodly nations around them were prospering, and God kept letting them get away with it! And so, they began to give up hope that living God’s way was worth it. Why lead a godly life, when the ungodly seem to be the ones getting ahead? It’s not just God’s people in Malachi’s day who need an answer to this question. We need to hear God’s voice on this issue as well. In this sermon from Malachi 2:17–3:5, we’ll explore three main points: 1) Wearisome Waiting Today’s mercies do not negate tomorrow’s justice. Just because we are bearing with patience the sins of this world… doesn’t mean justice will never come. Justice is calling and His name is Jesus. For the God of justice shall come to His own. And the great and awesome day of the Lord will be at hand. And when He shows up, His will be a purifying presence. 2) Purifying Presence Messiah will purify the heart of covenant worship. When the Lord comes, He shall purify His temple, the priesthood, and the offerings. No more defiled sacrifices. No more faithless priests. No more corrupt worship. This is why when Jesus cleanses the temple in Matthew 21, Mark 11, Luke 19, and John 2 it is a massively big deal. Jesus walks into the temple like he owns the place and starts setting things to rights. He comes suddenly to his temple! Like a refiner’s fire…blazing and consuming. Like a fullers’ soap…caustic and cleansing. He comes to purify the heart of covenant worship. It was all foretold right here in Malachi! And on the heels of his Purifying Presence will come His jarring justice. 3) Jarring Justice In Jesus, God ended evil without ending us. And Malachi is hinting at the day when… The Lord will end injustice without ending us. God found a way to purge the dross of our injustice and keep us for Himself as gold. In Jesus, God found a way to scourge the stain of our sin and keep us for Himself as a garment clean and whole. Takeaway: Our only hope to stand in Christ alone.Malachi 2:17–3:6

When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment in all the Law and the Prophets was, He gave a two-fold answer: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, AND love your neighbor as yourself.” Because if we love God rightly, we will love our neighbor; and a failure to love our neighbor is a failure to love God. This answer sums up the Law and the Prophets. And one of those Old Testament prophets was Malachi, whose book we’ve been studying in this series. Thus far we’ve seen how Malachi has called out God’s people for their failure to love God (the vertical axis). In Malachi 2:10–16, Malachi is going to turn his attention to the horizonal axis—about the relationship we have to one another—because the Israelites failed to love one another well. And in this 3rd of 6 disputes in the book, Malachi’s focus is on how the men of Israel failed to be faithful to their wives. They were faithless toward God and faithless toward their wives. This sermon has three parts: 1) Faithless Betrayal The Israelites were breaking faith with their wives and God. Not only were they abandoning their covenant with their wife as they divorced, but they were also abandoning their covenant with God as they welcomed idolatry into their homes, and they were trashing their own marriage covenants and the covenant of God Himself. But the problem ran even deeper than their faithless betrayal. All of this is arising from their fragmented hearts. 2) Fragmented Hearts Our spiritual lives cannot be compartmentalized. God insists on our integrity, our wholeness. All of life is under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Nothing is outside His domain. He wants our whole heart, not just a piece of it. He wants our full devotion. 3) Full Devotion God calls us to wholehearted covenant-love. Because there’s nothing God loves to do more than to take all the broken fragments of our lives and start making us whole, so that we can begin to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love our neighbor as ourselves. But there is a catch. To be whole, we must give Him our whole selves. Takeaway: We will never be whole until we are wholly His. It will not do to give God only a part of our selves. Jesus gave His whole self for you. Won’t you give your whole self to Him? Malachi 2:10–16

The slide into spiritual disintegration doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a steady slide over time. Have you ever wondered how the priests and teachers of the law got so far off spiritually that they couldn’t even see their Messiah, the Son of God, when He was standing right there in front of them? The spiritual decay of the priesthood went back centuries. Even as far back as the Book of Malachi, over 400 years before Jesus, the spiritual rot was already deep and widespread. And so, God had sent prophet after prophet to call them back to repentance, only to be ignored time and time again. So now, in His mercy, God sends Malachi to give them one final warning with language designed to shock them and call them back from the edge of spiritual decay and disaster. This sermon looks at the second half of the second dispute in the book of Malachi. It divides the discourse neatly into three sections: 1) The Curse The priests are in danger of losing their ministry. If they don’t course correct, all the blessings they enjoy in ministry will be taken away,just like the offal that’s taken away outside the city and cursed in the fire. Because there is nothing in their worship that is pleasing to the Lord. 2) The Covenant The priests have corrupted the essence of their calling. They neglected their walk with God. They distorted the teaching of the Word. They are calloused in their prayers of intercession. They corrupted the sacrificial offerings. The very heart of their priestly ministry was compromised.  And now, like a prosecuting attorney, God will bring the charge. 3) The Charge The priests have led the people astray with platitudes. They told people what they wanted to hear, and in so doing, feared people more than they feared God. The priests thought they were being loving by sparing people’s feelings with their sugar-coated half-truths. But it only led them away from God’s life and peace, and there’s ultimately nothing loving about that. And so, God said that He would make the priests despised and abased before all the people of Israel. Takeaway: We need the truth, the whole truth, and nothing by the truth…so help us God! The truth is, we owe God everything. He made us. He gave us life, breath, and everything else. We owe our all to Him. But we have failed to worship Him as we ought. We all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. We’ve all failed to love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. We’ve all failed to love our neighbor as ourselves. But God, in his great mercy, sent his Son Jesus. The bad news of our sin makes way for the good news of our salvation! Tough love gives us the bad news we’d prefer to ignore. Tender mercies give us the good news we find it hard to believe! Malach 2:1–9

The Book of Malachi is full of warnings that seem harsh at first but are actually filled with loving-concern to pull God’s people back from the edge of danger. Because although the people of Israel had come back from the exile eager to rededicate themselves to God, it wasn’t long before their fervor began to fade. They tired of waiting on God’s promises and fell into a kind of spiritual rut. They were doing the right religious things, but their hearts weren’t in it anymore. Can you relate? The Book of Malachi is shouting to us today: “Get back! There’s danger lurking right in front of you. You may not see it, but it’s there. Get back to safety, while you can.” In this passage, we see Malachi calling the people of God back from the precipice of withholding themselves in worship. There are three elements that we find in this passage: 1) Cavalier Worship At the beginning of the discourse, the Heavenly Father says, “Do you not owe me both honor and fear?” Now the word for “honor” here carries the idea of weightiness, heaviness, and glory. It indicates that God deserves to be the heavyweight in our lives, the One who matters above all. And the word for “fear” here carries the idea, not of cowering, but of reverential awe and trembling adoration. God deserves our reverential awe, the One before whom we tremble. The people of Israel neither honored nor feared God in worship as they should. They withheld their best worship from God, and their hearts were not in it. We dishonor God when we withhold our first and best. If you are concerned about your heart’s orientation to worship, ask this: is worship and delight or a drudgery? 2) Cursed Religion Cavalier worship leads to cursed religion. That sounds like overly strong language, but it’s God’s language in this passage. Why? God will receive the worship that is due His name. All peoples everywhere shall worship before Him. People from every nation, tribe, people, language, and tongue shall sing out my praise. And the warning from Malachi to Israel is clear: if Israel doesn’t return to a heart of worship, God will to the Gentiles and the nations who will worship Him. 400 years after Malachi wrote these words, that’s exactly what happened. In all the cavalier worship resulting in cursed religion, Israel had forgotten God’s compelling greatness. The potential consequences are enormous. 3) Compelling Greatness Israel forgot who they were and who God is. And all through this passage, God is reminding them of His compelling greatness in five images: Father, Master, Ruler, Commander, and Great King. All these images are designed to encourage Israel to: come back to the honor of the great name of the LORD. Takeaway: How will I give God my first and best? God gave us His first and best when He gave us Jesus. In view of that mercy, how can we not offer ourselves as living sacrifices? Malachi 1:6–14

The central theme of the book Malachi is found in 3:7, “Return to Me and I will return to you.” As people whose hearts are prone to wander, whose religion can become performance, we need the message of Malachi to comprehend God’s tough love and tender mercies for our doubting hearts. There are six disputes outlined in the book. In this sermon, we’ll explore the first dispute between Israel and God. And in these opening verses from Malachi 1, we find three things: 1) Weighty Concerns Malachi—whose Hebrew name means “my messenger”—begins his prophecy with these words: The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. Now the word translated as “oracle” here is literally in Hebrew the word for “burden.” These are weighty words from a heart heavy with care for a people whose souls weigh upon him. Malachi feels the weight of his responsibility. His concern for his people lies heavy upon his heart. The care of souls is a heavy burden. Aren’t you grateful for those who have loved you enough to burden themselves with the care of your soul? Aren’t you thankful for people who love you enough to speak heavy truths into your life? We desperately need people like Malachi who will faithfully bring the burden of the word of the Lord to the people whose souls weigh heavily upon their hearts. 2) Wary Hearts The people of Israel express frustration at the promises of God. They feel like the fulfillment of God’s promises are taking forever. They are doubting God’s love. They’re skeptical that He’s really for them. And so, they’re holding back in self-protection, wary of entrusting their hearts to God. Our hearts grow wary in the waiting. When the life we dreamed of fails to materialize, when God’s promises seem slow in coming true, and when hope feels out of reach, it’s easy to grow wary and doubt God’s goodness, power, and love. Have you ever been there? Sometimes things can seem so dark and confusing and hopeless that we begin to wonder if God really does love us after all. 3) Wonderous LoveMalachi had a weighty concern for the wary hearts of the people of Israel. Which is why he felt compelled to remind them of God’s wonderous love for them. God is forever faithful to His chosen ones. Friends, it’s hard to see it, but God’s love for you is bigger than your cancer diagnosis, God’s love for you is greater than your job loss, God’s love for you is wider than your relational disappointments, and God’s love for you is deeper than your financial losses. It’s bigger than anything! And if we focus on all our disappointed dreams, like Israel did, we’ll end up feeling miserably unloved, falsely assuming God only loves us if everything in life goes our way. But if instead we focus on His graces along the way, in the good times and the bad, His goodness and mercy following us all the days of our lives, faithfully bearing us into the glories He’s preparing for us in His redemptive love, it’s worth it in the end, because through it all, we’re getting more of Him! In life we can dwell on the gaps or the graces. If we dwell on the gaps, we’ll begin to doubt His love. If we dwell on the graces, we’ll learn to trust His love. Takeaway: Remember, you are loved, more than you know! Malachi 1:1–5

Why should we read the Psalms? Music enhances worship, and music helps us memorize the eternal truths of God. Psalm 103 teaches us how to praise in all seasons and for all reasons. When it comes to the issue of praise, authentic praise requires our all, not lip service. In this sermon, we explore five reasons why should we praise God:God heals our disease

God forgives our sin

God redeems our lives

God crowns us with love

God satisfies our souls with good. Takeaway: Above all, we praise God because He is holy! Psalm 103

Do you struggle with honest doubts about the Christian faith? Have you ever wondered what's the payoff for living a life of faith compared to the secular world? In this sermon, we explore Asaph's doubts from Psalm 73. Asaph was a musician who almost lost his faith; we would say he almost “deconstructed.” But he came out the other side spiritually stronger. Asaph gives three reasons for his doubts, but also explains three mistakes he had made when entertaining those doubts. 1) Asaph explains his doubts (v. 1–15). Three doubts Asaph had:The wicked are wealthier than he was.

The wicked are healthier than he was.

The wicked seems to enjoy life more than he did. 2) Asaph was kept from "deconstructing" when he realized his mistakes (v. 16–28). Three mistakes Asaph made:He had overestimated the wealth of the ungodly.

He had underestimated his own wealth.

He had been swept away by how he felt, not by what he knew to be true. Takeaway: Come to God with your doubts; think life through to the very end. The only thing that really matters is what matters forever. Psalm 73