Turn Back Now! (Mal. 3:6-4:6)
Hear
So, last week we looked at Israel’s failure to properly honor God as Father as well as their disregard for what they offered Him in terms of worship. We talked about our own failures in these areas as well. Again, Israel’s behavior (and ours) stemmed from a lack of gratitude for all that God had done for them and a rejection of God’s love.
When I was a kid, my mother and I had a serious conversation one day where I told her that I did not believe that she loved me. At the time, I felt as though she really did love my younger sisters, but not me. She tried to assure me that this wasn’t true. However, my belief that I was not loved by my mom affected the way I responded to her rules and expectations. Because I felt unloved, I behaved in unloving ways. Because I behaved unlovingly, my mom responded with discipline. Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, popular author of the book, Love & Respect calls this the crazy cycle in relationships. Well today, the crazy cycle continues with Israel.
In today’s message, Israel’s insensitivity to their own sin deepens the darkness and blinds them to the many ways they have dishonored God. Furthermore, it blinds them to the many ways that God has been loving and patient with them in their rebellion. God has always been faithful to the sons of Jacob. Despite how they may feel about God, He has been consistent in loving and caring for them. However, the sons of Jacob have not been consistent, at least not in terms of honoring God. As a nation they have been very consistent in their rebellion and sinful living. They have robbed God and treated Him rather unfairly. Despite all of this, the Lord wants Israel to return back to Him with a promise to take care of them despite historic waywardness.
Robbed? (Mal. 3:8-12)
I can remember in 2003, having a conversation with a guy about me going back to college. He asked what I wanted to study in college and I told him that I wanted to attend a Bible college and eventually serve on staff at a church. He replied by informing me that you can’t make any money by working in a church. To which I replied with, “If you are going into ministry for the money, then you’re in it for the wrong reasons.” I still believe that.
The Bible has a lot to say about money. It’s been argued that Jesus spoke more about money than He spoke of faith and prayer combined. However, I’m not so sure that is accurate, since He often used those messages to teach deeper spiritual issues. Regardless, we can’t get away from the fact that scripture does emphasize money and one of the great revealers of our commitments is our bank accounts and spending. Robby Gallaty confesses,
“We may not like to talk about money, but money talks a lot about us.”[i]
I want to begin by first looking at verses 8-12 of Malachi 3.
Malachi 3:8–12 NKJV
8 “Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed Me! But you say, ‘In what way have we robbed You?’ In tithes and offerings.
9 You are cursed with a curse, For you have robbed Me, Even this whole nation.
10 Bring all the tithes into the storehouse, That there may be food in My house, And try 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 such blessing That there will not be room enough to receive it.
11 “And I will rebuke the devourer for your sakes, So that he will not destroy the fruit of your ground, Nor shall the vine fail to bear fruit for you in the field,” Says the Lord of hosts;
12 And all nations will call you blessed, For you will be a delightful land,” Says the Lord of hosts
Again, God confronts the sons of Jacob with another rhetorical yet straightforward question. “Will a man rob God?” This is a softball question in my mind. A lay up if you will. The obvious answer, the only logical answer, should’ve been an emphatic no. But God’s people, always looking to justify our behaviors no matter how wrong we may be, turns the question back on God. “What do you mean? How have we robbed you?” God says, you have robbed me in your giving.
1 John 4:19 NKJV
19 We love [God] because [God] first loved us.
In a similar manner, we give to God, because He first gave to us. He gave us life. He gave us Jesus (Jn. 3:16). He gave us gifts for the growth and edification of His church (Eph. 4:11-16). He has given us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of Jesus Christ (2 Pt. 1:3). He has given us great and precious promises so that we can partake of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He gave us Holy Spirit as a Guarantee of our eternal inheritance (Eph. 1:14). He gave us a promise of adoption into His family (2 Cor. 1:22). And He gave us his word that He is coming back for us one day. So, our giving should be out of a great sense of gratitude for ALL that the Lord has given us and it should be done with joy, not grudgingly or out of compulsion.
God confronts His people for their stinginess and then He makes them a promise, inviting them to test Him in this matter. They have been testing God for as long as they’ve existed, but this is the first time that God invites them to do it. Last week God called His people a bunch of cheaters. This week He calls them a bunch of thieves. He says, you’ve robbed me in your giving, but I’ll make a deal with you. You trust Me with your tithes and offerings, you trust me with your giving, put what you have into my hands and I’ll bless you for your faith. Listen to me, God doesn’t need your money. God does not even want your money. God wants your heart. He just doesn’t want your money to have you!
Jesus tells us that
Matthew 6:21 NKJV
21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
That if we love this world and the things of this world then we will perish with this world.
When we are willing to do more to honor people than we are to honor God, that says a lot about how we view God in terms of worthiness and supremacy. If we will over-extend ourselves to indulge in things that are temporary in terms of pleasure, but we are unwilling to serve God sincerely with our time, talents, and wealth it tells the onlooker exactly what you think about God. He’s just not that important. I’ve known of people who would work an extra job or pick up an extra shift so they could take a vacation, or attend a major sporting event, or buy whatever, but who won’t serve an extra minute as a volunteer in church ministry. I watch the news and follow social media, and it is appalling to see how many people follow Taylor Swift and Beyonce from city to city, state to state, even country to country on their music tours, but who won’t give an hour a week to help a child read or who are just too busy to walk alongside a new believer and help them grow in their relationship with God or who can’t scrape enough pennies together to bless a missionary who is working to make sure that people can hear the Gospel in places where it is illegal to do so.
Don’t tell me that you love God when your agenda takes precedence over His will. You are robbing Him!
God says, if you trust Me with your wealth, I’ll open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing that will overtake you. This is equivalent to what Jesus says in Luke 6.
Luke 6:38 NKJV
38 Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.”
The problem that a lot of people run into when it comes to giving in the church is that they either expect an immediate return on their giving or they expect an in-kind return on their giving. They assume that if they give today, then God will return their investment tomorrow. Or, they assume that God will match their giving like it’s a 401K plan. Rarely does this ever happen but, when this is the game that people play and it doesn’t happen, they assume that God is at fault instead of finding fault with their expectations.
Harsh? (Mal. 3:13-18)
Not only were they robbing God in their giving, they were also talking bad about God because He wasn’t meeting their wicked expectations and their scathing critique was spreading throughout the entire community of God’s people.
Malachi 3:13–18 NKJV
13 “Your words have been harsh against Me,” Says the Lord, Yet you say, ‘What have we spoken against You?’
14 You have said, ‘It is useless to serve God; What profit is it that we have kept His ordinance, And that we have walked as mourners Before the Lord of hosts?
15 So now we call the proud blessed, For those who do wickedness are raised up; They even tempt God and go free.’ ”
16 Then those who feared the Lord spoke to one another, And the Lord listened and heard them; So a book of remembrance was written before Him For those who fear the Lord And who meditate on His name.
17 “They shall be Mine,” says the Lord of hosts, “On the day that I make them My jewels. And I will spare them As a man spares his own son who serves him.”
18 Then you shall again discern Between the righteous and the wicked, Between one who serves God And one who does not serve Him.
This section shows a contrast between the wicked and the righteous. Between those who know, love and trust God and those who would use God for their own benefit. The first group mentioned here, are an insolent bunch. Allen Ross calls them skeptics and unbelievers (Ross, 175). Given the benefit of the doubt, he says that if they actually were believers then
“their whole approach to the worship and service of God was mercenary - they wanted to know what was in it for them.”[ii]
These folks believed that it was useless, nothing more than a waste of time, to serve God. So, do you know what they did? They started spreading lies around about how God was mistreating them. They didn’t spread those lies to people who didn’t know Yahweh, they spread them amongst the people of God. They began “deconstructing” their faith because they believed they had nothing to show for their faithfulness to God.
Just a few years ago, in 2022, one of the pioneers of Christian hip hop, and a founding member of the Cross Movement. A guy who went by the name Phanatik, walked away from the Christian faith in total. He put out a public statement on FB where he shared how he arrived at this decision to abandon Christ and the church. He says,
“I sent a letter to my church withdrawing my membership and saying that I am denouncing the Christian faith that I have believed, professed, proclaimed and defended for the last 30 years of my life.”
Something he said that interested me in his video was when he shared about studying and preparing to teach in secular arenas. During that time, about 5-6 years, he admits that had not been reading God’s Word. Instead, He was trying to engage with God through the world. He had small devotionals, but no real study of God’s Word for about five years. One day he confronted God,
“I literally told God, like if I find one more thing in the scriptures that doesn’t have a good explanation without resorting to some kind of, having to bend over backwards and hop over barrels to explain it, I’m going to lose my faith.”[iii]
Phanatik, like so many others who have “deconstructed” their faith in God, lash out against God within the Christian community. They claim that Yahweh is not the Person they originally thought He was. It is sad to say, but some people use the Bible as a good luck charm or a genie’s lamp. They grab it whenever they need God to do something for them and then it goes right back on the self. Some people read their worldly experiences into the Word of God and where the two do not align, they find fault with God.
The only reason some folks show up on Sunday mornings is because their finances are low. Their relationship is falling apart. Their kids are out of control. Life has been hard and they think that by simply attending a church service every once and awhile it’ll put them in God’s good graces and He’ll turn things around for them. My friends, that is not the way it works! God is no rabbit’s foot.
Some folks in the church will never set foot in a casino or purchase a lottery ticket, but they sure will gamble with their spiritual lives.
And then, there’s the second group. Those who fear the Lord. When speaking of fearing God, we shouldn’t relegate the fear of God to mere congeniality where we simply use pleasant tones when we speak to or about God. To fear God means to show deference to Him out of recognition of His supremacy, authority, and strength.
While that first group of doubters where spreading lies about God amongst themselves, the second group was reminding each other about how faithful God had been to them. Isn’t that something? It’s funny how two people can have the same encounter with God and walk away with two opposing views of God. It happens all of the time. I heard the gospel in Oklahoma County jail in 1998 and I walked away set free! The Lord delivered me from my own rebellion and sin. There were others who heard the same Gospel message that I heard and they walked away unchanged. The Word went in one ear and out the other. It happens all the time, even in this place. Some people show up and check the box of church attendance and they walk out of this place as mean, as selfish, as ugly as they were before they heard the preaching of God’s Word.
You see, what made the difference between that first group and the second group is that group number two feared the Lord and they meditated on His Name. They were reminding each other about how good God had been despite their sin. They started telling each other stories like,
“You remember when Yahweh delivered us from Babylon?”
“You remember when our ancestors crossed the Red Sea on dry ground?”
“You remember His promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob?”
“Do you think He’ll forget about us?” Somebody would shout. “No way! He’ll never leave us nor forsake us.”
“He said, through the prophet Jeremiah, that when we pray to Him, He’ll listen to us and when we search for Him with our whole heart we’ll find Him and He’ll find us” (Jeremiah 29:12–13).
“He chose us.”
They were calling to mind God’s Word spoken to them throughout generations and it sustained them. The Word of God will do the same for you if you hold fast to it!
There is no substitute for the humble study of God’s Word. Where you surrender yourself to the Spirit’s assessment of you based on the scriptures. Joshua told the people of God that meditating on the Law and doing what it says leads to prosperity and success.
I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it; Faithfulness to God always has a reward! Don’t ever forget that.
A.W. Tozer said that,
A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well. It is to worship what the foundation is to the temple; where it is inadequate or out of plumb the whole structure must sooner or later collapse.[iv]
Folks, we must have a right, reverent and truly Biblical understanding of Who our God is otherwise we run the risk of placing expectations on Him that He has no desire to meet and our faith in Him will crumble because it was built with shoddy materials.
Return? (Mal. 3:6-7; 4:4-6)
Let’s look at this final section.
Malachi 3:6–7 NKJV
6 “For I am the Lord, I do not change; Therefore you are not consumed, O sons of Jacob.
7 Yet from the days of your fathers You have gone away from My ordinances And have not kept them. Return to Me, and I will return to you,” Says the Lord of hosts. “But you said, ‘In what way shall we return?’
The lead in of these final two disputes is a reminder of God’s faithfulness and the unfaithfulness of His people. The fact that God does not change should both comfort us and concern us. It should concern us because He still does not tolerate sin. He is still a God of judgement and that He still holds the wicked accountable for their sin. On the other hand, it should comfort us because we know that He is still longsuffering. His mercy endures forever. And, the Name of Jesus is still able to save.
Unger says that,
The immutability of God, guaranteeing judgment of sin, at the same time assures the grace of God and His fidelity to His covenants and promises.[v]
God begins this section by declaring His faithfulness. “I do not change.” But, not only has God not changed, in a sense, neither has the people He’s chosen.
Malachi 3:7 NKJV
7 Yet from the days of your fathers You have gone away from My ordinances And have not kept them.
And still, because He is faithful, even when we are without faith, God desires a loving relationship with these people and with us as well. So, like with the majority of the churches in the book of Revelation, He calls them to turn back to Him. He calls them to repentance. Of all the questions in the entire book of Malachi, the only question that made any sense is in verse seven. “In what way shall we return?” “How can we turn back?” In verses five and six of chapter four, God says, “I’ll help you out.”
Malachi 4:5–6 NKJV
5 Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet Before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
6 And he will turn The hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.”
We understand that Elijah in these verses refers to John the Baptist (Matt. 11:13-14)
Matthew 11:13–14 NKJV
13 For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John.
14 And if you are willing to receive it, he is Elijah who is to come.
When John came on the scene in the gospels he came preaching a message of repentance in preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ (Matt. 3:2).
Matthew 3:2 NKJV
2 and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”
Rosaria Butterfield says that, “the Bible teaches that what separates a believer from an unbeliever is repentance.”[vi] And repentance, she says, “...is not an end point; it is a launching pad” to holiness.[vii]
You see, repentance is a change of mind and heart that leads to a change of behavior. Many of the folks in Malachi’s day had the wrong idea about God. They, like the prodigal son, needed to come to their senses and go home. They needed to turn back to God. The same is true for you if you’re a Christian who has been living your life in opposition to God. If you’ve given in to the seducing spirits of the world which are leading you astray - turn back now! Repent!
God’s Word promises that
Ezekiel 18:27 NKJV
27 ...when a wicked man turns away from the wickedness which he committed, and does what is lawful and right, he preserves himself alive.
2 Peter 3:9 NKJV
9 The Lord is not slack concerning His promise, as some count slackness, but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance.
Isaiah 30:15 NIV
15 This is what the Sovereign Lord, the Holy One of Israel, says:
“In repentance and rest is your salvation,
in quietness and trust is your strength,
but you would have none of it.
Respond
My friends, some of you have been walking contrary to God for quite some time now. You know who you are. Some of you have been gambling with your faith for years. You think that God owes you more than you are willing to commit to Him. This morning, I want to invite you to give it up. To lay it all at the foot of the cross and let the righteousness of Jesus fill your life.
If you are not a Christian, today is your opportunity. If you will call on the Name of the Lord He promises you salvation.
If you are a Christian and you heard the Lord calling you to repentance today, please come.
If you need prayer or you want to join this congregation and make BCC your church home, please come.
Tré Clark
Britton Christian Church
Aug. 21st, 2025
Works Cited
[i] [1] Micah Fries, Stephen Rummage, and Robby Gallaty, Exalting Jesus in Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, ed. David Platt, Daniel L. Akin, and Tony Merida, Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary (Nashville, TN: Holman Reference, 2015), 252.
[ii] Malachi: Then and Now, p175
[iii] (https://www.facebook.com/brady.p.goodwin.1/videos/523039552177472/)
[iv] (A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, p2).
[v] (Unger’s Commentary on the Old Testament, p2079)
[vi] (The Gospel Comes with a Housekey, P123)
[vii] (The Gospel Comes with a Housekey, P133)
