SPEAKER_00: Pray with me.
SPEAKER_00: Will you, Father in heaven?
SPEAKER_00: God, that's what we want this morning.
SPEAKER_00: We want to be a people that are only known by our love for you.
SPEAKER_00: God, I pray that you would speak to us in a clear and powerful way this morning.
SPEAKER_00: You've done so many awesome things already in this room.
SPEAKER_00: God, I pray that you would speak to us now through the power of your word, through the presence of your spirit.
SPEAKER_00: We pray all these things in the strong and powerful name of Jesus Christ our Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: All right, you can go ahead and have a seat.
SPEAKER_00: I want to welcome you again to Family Church Downtown.
SPEAKER_00: My name is Derek Simpson.
SPEAKER_00: I serve as one of the pastors here at Family Church Downtown.
SPEAKER_00: It is great to be with you today.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not the ordinary Bible teacher at Family Church Downtown.
SPEAKER_00: Normally, Pastor Jimmy Scrogans is with us.
SPEAKER_00: He uh teaches the Bible here most Sunday mornings.
SPEAKER_00: He's my favorite Bible teacher, so I'm always probably like you, a little bit disappointed when he's not the one preaching, but I uh am excited to be with you today.
SPEAKER_00: Over the last several years, Pastor Jimmy has grown a friendship with a Bible teacher in Southern California named Dr.
SPEAKER_00: David Jeremiah.
SPEAKER_00: And so he and Kristen are on the west coast of the U.S.
SPEAKER_00: today, uh preaching there at Shadow Mountain.
SPEAKER_00: He'll be back in West Palm next week and back with us at Family Church downtown, not too uh in just in just a couple of weeks.
SPEAKER_00: Um I'm really grateful for all the things that's already happened in the room.
SPEAKER_00: Uh I love seeing Pastor Christian Rodriguez up here and do such a fantastic job leading on the platform.
SPEAKER_00: I love the scene.
SPEAKER_00: You sang so great today.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I love the songs that we sang.
SPEAKER_00: I love uh I loved watching, wasn't it awesome having all those kids that just completed our kids' new believers class?
SPEAKER_00: Man, you you look at the you look at the platform, you look at all those children, all those parents, all those moms and dads, none of them are perfect, none of them claim to be.
SPEAKER_00: But I tell you what you see for our churches, you see the future, man.
SPEAKER_00: You see that there's like there are there's children that are growing up here.
SPEAKER_00: And you should, I wish you could have seen one of the one of the most awesome things that happened here this morning was watching all the third graders and fourth graders from family church that are down here that were cheering on Wyatt as he got baptized, and then those kids were fired up for their friend because Wyatt got baptized.
SPEAKER_00: And then uh Miles, man, what where did Miles go?
SPEAKER_00: Where am I?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, there he's still still changing.
SPEAKER_00: All right, well, I was gonna brag about Miles.
SPEAKER_00: Miles getting baptized was such an awesome thing because um you talk about a guy who is just magnetic and just people just love being around him, he's just who just has the has the unbelievable capacity to influence people for Jesus and to see Miles go public with his faith and to have have his mom and his dad and his sister, the people I know he loves, just deeply here cheering him on.
SPEAKER_00: It's just so, so very awesome.
SPEAKER_00: All right, so uh today uh we're uh we're finishing our final uh series in our 12-week teaching series through the Old Testament collection of books called the Minor Prophets.
SPEAKER_00: This is the last one.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're like, oh, when is it gonna be over?
SPEAKER_00: Today.
SPEAKER_00: Today is the last one, okay?
SPEAKER_00: You made it.
SPEAKER_00: If you're just joining us, you have a lot to catch up on.
SPEAKER_00: Go to our YouTube channel.
SPEAKER_00: I can't catch you up, but uh here here's um here's what I'll tell you about um so we're sitting in the book of Malachi.
SPEAKER_00: So this is the last book in the Old Testament.
SPEAKER_00: If you're not good at finding things in the Old Testament, if you can find the New Testament gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, find Matthew, go back to the left, just a couple of pages, and we're gonna start in Malachi chapter one.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi is um he's an interesting kind of historical figure in the scriptures because he's one of the historical figures in the Bible that we know the least about.
SPEAKER_00: He's very rarely, he's not he's not mentioned anywhere else in the scriptures, and he just gets one mentioned here in this book, but it's an important book because this book closes the Old Testament canon, it closes the Old Testament scriptures, and there's a lot to study, there's a lot to learn, there's a lot of these, a lot of things that really apply to us here today.
SPEAKER_00: And so I hope that you'll write some things down.
SPEAKER_00: Not enough.
SPEAKER_00: In 2005, going all the way back to 2005, I was a uh seminary student, and uh I read a book when I was in seminary by a guy named Christian Smith.
SPEAKER_00: He's an author, he's a he's an academic, he's a sociologist.
SPEAKER_00: Uh at the time he was with the University of North Carolina, and he was a just retired from the University of Notre Dame.
SPEAKER_00: But he wrote this book called Soul Searching.
SPEAKER_00: He led a team of researchers through a multi-year study of religion in America, specifically focused on religion in young people.
SPEAKER_00: And he said that the dominant religion of the day, and I think it's still true today, that the dominant religion of that emerging generation at the time was uh a religion that he coined, an idea that he coined, moral therapeutic deism.
SPEAKER_00: Moral therapeutic deism.
SPEAKER_00: And the ideas of moral therapeutic deism were basically had five tenets.
SPEAKER_00: He said, number one, it's the idea that God exists, and that this generation believed that God exists, God created the world, and God interacted with the world and watches over humans in a unique way.
SPEAKER_00: He said that uh he people thought that God was uh wanted them to be morally good, to be nice to one another, to be fair with one another.
SPEAKER_00: He said that people thought that God uh thought that their life would be about, life was mostly about being happy and mostly about being fulfilled.
SPEAKER_00: That was the purpose of life.
SPEAKER_00: The primary uh most people that kind of ascribed to this idea didn't really think about God very much in their day-to-day interactions, they just kind of lived life.
SPEAKER_00: But when there was a crisis, when there was something happening, when there was an emergency in their life, that's when they would turn to God's and they would think about God the most.
SPEAKER_00: And finally, he said that most people just kind of thought that heaven was kind of a nebulous thing that, and that most people, if they were good, generally kind of good enough, most people would go to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: Moral therapeutic deism is an academic way, with a lot of uh really smart sounding words of saying someone is Christian-ish.
SPEAKER_00: Christian-ish is somebody who doesn't, they don't ascribe to somebody who's, they won't ascribe to like another major world religion.
SPEAKER_00: Like they're not a Buddhist, they're not a Hindu, uh, they're not certainly not an Islamist, but not a Muslim, but also not an atheist.
SPEAKER_00: Not somebody who rejects the existence of a creator.
SPEAKER_00: A Christian issues is a person who's someone who's uh acknowledges God, acknowledges the God of the Bible, even acknowledges that most of the commands of the God of the Bible are good, but in some parts of their life, maybe they don't follow it.
SPEAKER_00: They don't take it as seriously.
SPEAKER_00: I say, listen, regular worship, that's important.
SPEAKER_00: You should go to church, except get a travel ball tournament, hunting season opens, get a good tea time, good day at the beach, whatever it might be, that would be important, but there's some things that might knock you off.
SPEAKER_00: You know, God's design for sexuality, probably a really good thing, but I mean the economics of living together is so expensive in South Florida and blah, blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: And then you start making excuses.
SPEAKER_00: You know, faith is important to me, but like, would I die for it?
unknown: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: A Christianish person might say, I don't know if I would die for it.
SPEAKER_00: If you're brand new to family church, this is your first time here.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to feel attacked.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want you to feel targeted.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna let you listen in this morning on a conversation that's mostly for the people that are that call themselves Christians.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi is writing to a group of people who should have known better, but that were kind of had kind of let their behavior and with their attitude and their actions slide into something that wasn't really who they were supposed to be.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that you feel warm here.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that you feel welcome.
SPEAKER_00: This certainly isn't a perfect church, but I will tell you what we're trying to do here at Family Church is we're trying to take the God of the Bible seriously.
SPEAKER_00: We're trying to actually really believe this stuff and live this stuff out.
SPEAKER_00: And we don't want to be Christian-ish at Family Church.
SPEAKER_00: We want to be a church that's marked by people who really believe the God of the Bible and we really believe the things that we're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: So I invite you to get your Bibles out.
SPEAKER_00: Turn your Bibles on to the book of Malachi.
SPEAKER_00: If you have something to write with, I will encourage you to take some notes and write some things down.
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to get the set the context for you a little bit about what is happening in the book of Malachi.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi is one of those minor prophets.
SPEAKER_00: It's just too long for us to read the whole thing out loud in the service, but it's not too long that you can't do it in five or ten minutes in your uh in your own home.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe maybe you should uh set a goal to try to do that today before you go to bed.
SPEAKER_00: It was written in the 400s B.C.
SPEAKER_00: So just catch you up on the timeline of what we've been talking about for the last several weeks.
SPEAKER_00: In 722 BC, Israel falls to Assyria.
SPEAKER_00: In 586 BC, Judah gets exiled to Babylon.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, they get taken into captivity, they get exiled to Babylon.
SPEAKER_00: In 539 BC, Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon.
SPEAKER_00: The Persians take over, and the Persians take over, and they uh the Greeks take over and they they send, uh send the Jewish people back to Jerusalem.
SPEAKER_00: And the land, so so when Malachi is writing in the 400s, the land has already been restored.
SPEAKER_00: They've already been exiled, they've come back.
SPEAKER_00: The temple has been rebuilt.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, we preached to the books of Haggai and Zachariah, so the temple has been rebuilt.
SPEAKER_00: Not as great as the first one, but the temple has been rebuilt.
SPEAKER_00: Worship has resumed in the temple.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, we studied the book of Ezra and how the worship and the rhythms of worship had been reintroduced, and there was a revival in the in the uh the Jewish people there.
SPEAKER_00: Jerusalem's walls were probably already fully constructed or nearing completion through the effective leadership of Nehemiah.
SPEAKER_00: We studied the book of Nehemiah in this series.
SPEAKER_00: And so this is about 80 years or so, probably, after the temple had been completed, the rhythms of worship had been re-established.
SPEAKER_00: So much so that the rhythms of worship that Ezra celebrated were starting to become diluted.
SPEAKER_00: They're starting to become abandoned.
SPEAKER_00: They're starting to neglect the rhythms of worship the way they were supposed to.
SPEAKER_00: And so the book of Malachi is organized around six different objections that God has with the people.
SPEAKER_00: And he raises them with the people, and he does it in kind of a call and response format.
SPEAKER_00: He quotes back to the people questions that they had been asking in their heart or questions they'd been voicing out loud.
SPEAKER_00: And from the very beginning of the book, you get a sense of the idea that God cares deeply about how we worship and how we live.
SPEAKER_00: God cares deeply about us individually, about how we worship, our attitude to worship, the sincerity of our worship, and how we live our lives.
SPEAKER_00: How we connect what happens in here on a Sunday morning to how we do business and how we conduct ourselves on Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday throughout our communities and in our homes and in our neighborhoods and on our sports teams.
SPEAKER_00: So Malachi chapter 1, verses 1 through 5.
SPEAKER_00: This is how the book begins.
SPEAKER_00: The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi is a word that simply means my messenger.
SPEAKER_00: So Malachi is a messenger from God to the people.
SPEAKER_00: I have loved you, says the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: But you say, How have you loved us?
SPEAKER_00: Is not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated.
SPEAKER_00: I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to jackals of the desert.
SPEAKER_00: If Edom says, We are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord of hosts says, They may build, but I will tear down, and they will be called the wicked country, and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever.
SPEAKER_00: Essentially a summary of the book of Obadiah.
SPEAKER_00: The whole book of Obadiah that we studied is essentially that message over and over and over again.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 5, your own eyes shall see this, and you shall say, Great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: God is writing this book, and he's using this prophet Malachi to re-establish this idea that the Lord is great and his name should be worshipped and it should be praised effectively and righteously by the people.
SPEAKER_00: Look back at verse 2.
SPEAKER_00: The verse 2, the whole idea that God is trying to drive home to the people is listen, I love you.
SPEAKER_00: The God of the universe loves you.
SPEAKER_00: And he's trying to reinforce that fact kind of from a negative perspective.
SPEAKER_00: He says, look, if I didn't care about you, if I didn't love you, if you thought I really didn't care about you, if I was really angry and upset with you and really wasn't with you and committed to you, you would be like Edom.
SPEAKER_00: There's actually a there's an example of that in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: And Edom.
SPEAKER_00: And Edom, it doesn't matter how much they try, how much they try to, they they were, I would constantly thwart them because I was not with them, but I'm with you.
SPEAKER_00: I love you.
SPEAKER_00: I care about you.
SPEAKER_00: You would know it for sure.
SPEAKER_00: As we start this Bible study, as we as we walk through this Bible study, I want you to be convinced.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to be reaffirmed in the idea that the God of the universe loves you.
SPEAKER_00: He knows you, he knows you by name, he knows things about you that nobody else knows.
SPEAKER_00: He sees your thoughts.
SPEAKER_00: The God of the universe cares about you.
SPEAKER_00: And he wrote this scripture for you so that you could know how to worship him, how you can have a relationship with him, and how you could honor him with your entire life.
SPEAKER_00: He wants you to be a real Christian, not just Christian-ish.
SPEAKER_00: So if you're taking some notes, we write some things down.
SPEAKER_00: Number one on your notes, Christian-ish is not enough.
SPEAKER_00: Give your best to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Look down a little bit at verse 11, verses 11 through 14.
SPEAKER_00: From the rising of the sun to its setting, my name will be great among the nations.
SPEAKER_00: And in every place incense will be offered to my name and a pure offering.
SPEAKER_00: For my name will be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_00: But you profane it when you say that the Lord's table is polluted, and its fruit, that is, its food, may be despised.
SPEAKER_00: But you say, What a weariness this is.
SPEAKER_00: And you snort at it, says the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_00: You bring what had been taken by violence, or is lame or sick, and this you bring as your offering?
SPEAKER_00: Shall I accept that from your hand, says the Lord?
SPEAKER_00: Cursed be the sheep who has a male in his flock and vows it, and yet sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished.
SPEAKER_00: For I am a great king, says the Lord of hosts, and my name will be feared among the nations.
SPEAKER_00: One of the things that you see early on in the book of Malachi is how many how often the God of the universe refers to himself by his name.
SPEAKER_00: That's because the name of God is great, it's deserving of pure worship, and he is re-establishing and reasserting and reminding the people that he is God and he is distinct from them.
SPEAKER_00: He is not a created being, he is not departed from his own design, but they have.
SPEAKER_00: God is separate and distinct.
SPEAKER_00: He is different than the humans.
SPEAKER_00: He is the one true and living God, and only he is worthy of worship and praise.
SPEAKER_00: In the days of Ezra, there was a rededication of the temple.
SPEAKER_00: There was a revival, man.
SPEAKER_00: These people were on fire, and they were reading the old scriptures, they were going back through the laws, they were going back through the covenants, they're going back through the temple practices and the rituals, and they were doing all the stuff.
SPEAKER_00: They were making the sacrifices, they were bringing the offerings, they were uh observing the feasts, they were observing the fast, they were doing all the things that they were supposed to do, they were doing it with the right heart.
SPEAKER_00: But over time, slowly, year by year, generation by generation, they'd gotten accustomed to not bringing the choicest lamb, the choicest goats, like they were supposed to.
SPEAKER_00: They were bringing the lame ones, the sick ones, the blemished animals, the ones they wouldn't, the ones they wouldn't do any, they couldn't do anything else in the marketplace with them.
SPEAKER_00: They couldn't do anything, they wouldn't, they wouldn't feed it to their family, they wouldn't even, certainly wouldn't pay their taxes with it.
SPEAKER_00: They would just bring that to the Lord because they had started to undervalue the rhythms of worship.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 10, if you go back and look at verse 10, it says, like, it would actually be better for the priest to shut the doors to the temple and to not light the fire of the altar in vain rather than to receive these faulty offerings.
SPEAKER_00: They were just simply going through the motions of worship.
SPEAKER_00: You may have seen this gift of this security guard uh guarding a sporting event, and they're just going through the motions.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it felt like.
SPEAKER_00: They would come in, they'd bring their animal, it would have blemishes, it would have spots, it would be disease, and they'd say, This is the best I have.
SPEAKER_00: And the priest would look at it and go, looks good to me.
SPEAKER_00: Go over there and offer it.
SPEAKER_00: And they're just checking boxes.
SPEAKER_00: Verse 80 says, How would you bring something to worship the one true living God that you wouldn't even bring to the government?
SPEAKER_00: You wouldn't even pay your taxes with it, but you would sacrifice it to the Lord?
SPEAKER_00: What does that say about you?
SPEAKER_00: What does that say about me?
SPEAKER_00: What does it say about your heart?
SPEAKER_00: About who you really fear?
SPEAKER_00: Whose judgment do you really ultimately, are you really ultimately most concerned with?
SPEAKER_00: That's a good question to ask yourself as you evaluate your own worship, as you look at your time, your budget, the rhythms of your family.
SPEAKER_00: Who is it that you ultimately fear?
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing that you organize your life around.
SPEAKER_00: Later in the book, in chapter three, he comes back to the idea of giving, not just the offerings, but the tithes and the offerings, and he says, goes back to the idea of giving as an act of worship, and that that's a that's a uh for him uh a feedback loop, a measurement of of authenticity in worship.
SPEAKER_00: In Malachi chapter 3, verses 9 and 10, he says this.
SPEAKER_00: He says, You are cursed with a curse, for you're robbing me, the whole nation, of you.
SPEAKER_00: Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house, and thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_00: If I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.
SPEAKER_00: A part of your rhythm of worship should be to give to relentless pursuit.
SPEAKER_00: It's not the only act of worship.
SPEAKER_00: You should, you should, you should do all of it.
SPEAKER_00: You should lean into all of it.
SPEAKER_00: You should come regularly, you should you should sing, you should take notes, you should, you should serve, but you should give.
SPEAKER_00: I I tell you what, I'm so excited about the things that are happening in our church.
SPEAKER_00: You know that just so far this year, just halfway through the year, over 1,200 people have been to first connection already this year at Family Church.
SPEAKER_00: We baptized over 400 people just just last week, just in one week, one weekend, we baptized 86 people just last Sunday uh through our family as a church.
SPEAKER_00: I think it's incredible.
SPEAKER_00: We're still hearing stories of the almost a thousand teenagers and elementary age kids that we took to camp.
SPEAKER_00: And you know that in 2027, we're gonna we're gonna launch three brand new neighborhood churches uh in our family of churches.
SPEAKER_00: And did you know that this year over a thousand people have started giving to relentless pursuit?
SPEAKER_00: Just this year, they just started they started their giving journey.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, why would you miss out on a blessing from God?
SPEAKER_00: If you look at verse 10 and what he says in chapter 3, verse 10, he says, he says, this is something that you can actually test me in, you can put me to the test, and I will open the windows of heaven for you and pour out a blessing on you.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord is a great.
SPEAKER_00: Why do we offer the God of the universe our best?
SPEAKER_00: Because he's a great king.
SPEAKER_00: You offer your best to him because he alone is great.
SPEAKER_00: And it's really interesting in this, in this, uh, in this little pricky here, this little this little section of scripture, he offers a double warning to the people, but also to the priests.
SPEAKER_00: He offers a warning to the to the priest, and he says, Hey, the priests, the people that are responsible for for overseeing the worship of the people, have a have a double duty to handle the holy things of God with great care.
SPEAKER_00: You know, today's a um today's a first connection Sunday.
SPEAKER_00: So uh every week or every every month when we have first connection, one of the things that I get the privilege to do is I get the privilege to sit down and talk with people.
SPEAKER_00: And there's uh in the room, there's there's tables and there's uh all these people who are new to our church and checking things out.
SPEAKER_00: And if you've never been to First Connection, you should you should come.
SPEAKER_00: But one of the things that we do at First Connection is we just try to learn a little bit about your story and who you are and why is it that you're interested in coming to family church.
SPEAKER_00: And so I talk with people, and almost every single month we hear stories, they break my heart of people that are coming back to the church, or they're very, they're very timid, or they're very, they're very scared about reconnecting with the church because at some point in their past they had a really, really, really bad experience with a pastor who abused his trust, with a church that became divided over the wrong kinds of uh things, over hypocrisy or theft, or maybe even just real spiritual abuse.
SPEAKER_00: And I know it can be really, really hard for some of you.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you, you're here for the very first time.
SPEAKER_00: You've never been to our church before, you're here for the very first time, and you're for a long time, you step back into a church like this, and you're nervous.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that I can tell you about families that I love about being here, one of the reasons.
SPEAKER_00: That we moved our family here is because we have found that this place is certainly not perfect, but these people and these leaders, the authenticity of them is real.
SPEAKER_00: I love the people that I get to serve with, and I'm so uh proud of them.
SPEAKER_00: I'm number one, I'm proud that they're all quick to acknowledge their imperfections.
SPEAKER_00: None of them claim to be perfect, none of them, none of them put on airs about that.
SPEAKER_00: They're all quick to acknowledge their imperfections, but they're also talented and godly and committed to Christ, and all of them, uh all of them are doing ministry, not because it's the only job they could get, but they're doing it because they're called to it and they're gifted for it and they're talented for it.
SPEAKER_00: Think about guys like Pastor Jimmy.
SPEAKER_00: Man, I've known Pastor Jimmy for 25 years.
SPEAKER_00: Since I was 18 years old, uh Megan and I were just kids.
SPEAKER_00: And he and Christian were, you know, not a whole lot older, but a little bit older.
SPEAKER_00: They're down the road a little bit, and they would have been married for a couple years, and they served as mentors for us.
SPEAKER_00: And he's brilliant and humble and generous with his time and generous with his talent.
SPEAKER_00: He could do a lot of things, but God's called him to do this, and he does it with a great heart and with a pure heart.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm grateful to serve with him.
SPEAKER_00: He's frustratingly good at too many things.
SPEAKER_00: I say it often, he shouldn't be that tall, handsome, haired, sing, preach, all those things.
SPEAKER_00: But he's proven himself here in this community for over two decades.
SPEAKER_00: As a husband, as a dad, as a preacher, as a worship leader, as a genuine pastor, one of the most frustrating.
SPEAKER_00: Like, even like when I think, like, hey, I'm going to do a hospital visit, and I think, man, I'm, you know, I'm really doing something.
SPEAKER_00: And I find out Pastor Christian's already been there.
SPEAKER_00: She's good at everything.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Zach Rickers was just on the platform.
SPEAKER_00: Man, you won't find a more fun, more creative, more intentional, and interactive kids pastor in all of the land.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he and Amber and his kids have been here for now uh for like I think 16 or 17 years.
SPEAKER_00: They have served faithfully and well, and and he is by far, far and away, the best uh pastor to children and families in the country.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor Christian Rodriguez grew up right here in front of us, and and you won't find a more engaging and more dynamic.
SPEAKER_00: He can even cough into a microphone and then make y'all laugh about it, not be embarrassed by it.
SPEAKER_00: But he has real gifts and he's growing his family right here around us, and we get to see him grow up, and we know, hey, that's a guy who's going places, and that's a guy who's who's walking with Jesus and he's doing the real things.
SPEAKER_00: He's not Christianish, he's doing the real stuff.
SPEAKER_00: Pastor John McTaggart leads all of our ministries to uh to students and to college students across our whole family of churches.
SPEAKER_00: You won't find a more effective, more organized leader.
SPEAKER_00: How many churches in the U.S.
SPEAKER_00: have a have a have a have a student pastor who has a PhD in preaching, who can bench press 300 pounds, who can preach like he can, who can organize like nobody.
SPEAKER_00: He's one of one.
SPEAKER_00: Janelle Bannister was just in here dedicating or celebrating Kids New Believers class.
SPEAKER_00: She oversees ministries to hundreds of preschool kids.
SPEAKER_00: Hundreds of preschool kids in their families all across Family Church, right here at Family Church Downtown.
SPEAKER_00: She knows all of them by name.
SPEAKER_00: She knows their favorite color.
SPEAKER_00: She knows their pets' names.
SPEAKER_00: She's, I mean, she's involved in the lives of these families.
SPEAKER_00: She is a tireless, tireless worker, and she brings joy, infectious joy to everything that she does.
SPEAKER_00: It's one of the values of a neighborhood church.
SPEAKER_00: You know your shepherds.
SPEAKER_00: You know the people that you're connected to.
SPEAKER_00: You get to see their lives.
SPEAKER_00: Are they perfect?
SPEAKER_00: No, of course not.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's claiming to be.
SPEAKER_00: I tell you what, they take this stuff seriously, but they really, really believe it.
SPEAKER_00: They really, really believe it.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at chapter 2, verse 3, there's some consequences, some nasty and some some there's some consequences for a priest.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to read all out loud, but for the for the priests who mishandle the holy things of God, Malachi uses some disgusting imagery to convey just how serious he is about all of us honoring the Lord with our very best.
SPEAKER_00: And so I've just asked you this morning how are you doing with this?
SPEAKER_00: Are you giving your very best to the Lord in every area of your life?
SPEAKER_00: Do you show up for worship with a clean conscience?
SPEAKER_00: Are you singing the songs or are you just standing there mumbling through it?
SPEAKER_00: Are you taking notes?
SPEAKER_00: Are you engaging or are you thinking about other things?
SPEAKER_00: Are you given to relentless pursuit?
SPEAKER_00: Are you using God's giving you some very real spiritual gifts, uh, so some very real experiences, some leadership experiences that you've developed in some other organizations, some other places that you could use to make this place better and minister to people.
SPEAKER_00: Are you using those to the maximum extent of your ability?
SPEAKER_00: Are you connecting with people or are you just soaking it all in and consuming it and then leaving?
SPEAKER_00: Number two, on your notes, be faithful to your family.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't want to just be Christian, ish, if you want to be a real deal Christian, you got to be faithful to your family.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi 2, verses 13 through 16 say this.
SPEAKER_00: And the second thing you do, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning, because he no longer regards the offering or accepts it with favor from your hand.
SPEAKER_00: But you say, Why does he not?
SPEAKER_00: Why does he not receive my offering?
SPEAKER_00: Because the Lord was witness between you and the wife of your youth, to whom you have been faithless.
SPEAKER_00: Though she is your companion and your wife by covenant.
SPEAKER_00: Did he, the Lord, not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union?
SPEAKER_00: And what was the one God seeking?
SPEAKER_00: Godly offspring.
SPEAKER_00: So guard yourselves in spirit and let none of your faithlessness, let none of you be faithless to the wife of your youth.
SPEAKER_00: The man who does not love his wife but divorces her, says the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: The God of Israel covers his garments with violence, says the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_00: So guard yourselves in spirit and do not be faithless.
SPEAKER_00: One of the hallmarks of a Christian who isn't comfortable just being Christian-ish, but wants to be a real deal Christian, is their commitment to radical, ordinary faithfulness in every dimension of their life, and that begins at home.
SPEAKER_00: It begins with your marriage, begins with your faithfulness to your wife, to your husband, to your children, to your faith, to your church family.
SPEAKER_00: All throughout the Old Testament, God prohibited his people from marrying foreigners from other lands and other tribes and other religions.
SPEAKER_00: He did that because he wanted to maintain a sense of religious uh purity among the people of God because he knew and he warned the leaders of Israel that if they began to marry men and women from other uh other nations that didn't worship the one true God, that eventually their worship would become diluted, their customs would get tangled up and mixed up, and when that happens, the couples almost never drift closer to alignment with the with God's design.
SPEAKER_00: When you start to mix different levels of religious intensity and different focus of worship, you almost never, you're never, almost never gonna drift and find yourself closer in alignment with God's design.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them, verse 14 tells us, were even divorcing their spouses so that they could marry these foreign women.
SPEAKER_00: In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul, St.
SPEAKER_00: Paul says it like this.
SPEAKER_00: He says in verse, in chapter 6, uh 2 Corinthians 6, 14, not to be unequally yoked in your marriage.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because marriage is a lifelong commitment, it's a partnership, it's a friendship that encompasses every dimension of life.
SPEAKER_00: Travel, recreation, friendship, sex, finances, raising children.
SPEAKER_00: It's not possible for your worship to be directed in different directions or in different intensities and for it to not affect your relationship.
SPEAKER_00: If you're gonna be married to somebody, if you're a Christian, you ought to be married to another Christian.
SPEAKER_00: Not just a Christian in name only, or a Christian-ish Christian, but a real Christian who really believes it, who's committed to the scriptures and who's committed to God's design for your family.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi reinforces what God's design for family is: one man, one woman for life.
SPEAKER_00: Family is the great proving ground of whether you are a real Christian or if you're just Christian-ish.
SPEAKER_00: Because it gives you so many different arenas in which you have to make choices.
SPEAKER_00: Entertainment, free time, schedule, sports, sports as a tool for discipleship or a tool for as an idol, education as a means of cultivating virtue, or education just as the pursuit of pride or ego or status.
SPEAKER_00: How you use your home as an outpost of the gospel reflects the hospitality of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Number three on your notes, keep returning to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Keep returning to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi 3, verses 6 and 7, for I the Lord do not change, the Bible says, Therefore, you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed.
SPEAKER_00: For the days of your father you have turned aside from my statutes, and you have not kept them.
SPEAKER_00: Return to me, and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_00: But you say, How shall we return?
SPEAKER_00: When I go to the beach with our family, we have six kids, we have two little boys, we have a five-year-old and a two-year-old.
SPEAKER_00: And so typically the duties are responsible are whenever we go to the, especially with the little guys, um, I'm responsible for everything that happens in the water, and Megan's responsible for everything that happens in the sand.
SPEAKER_00: So she has the chairs, the snacks, the drinks, all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I'm in charge of making sure that there's no like, you know, lifeguards don't get involved.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: So that's that those are kind of our those are our duties at the beach.
SPEAKER_00: And every time I go to the beach, the boys love, they go, they love the, they love the waves, they love the ocean, they love getting beat up by the waves, they're getting thrown around.
SPEAKER_00: Every time I go, I have to have the same conversation.
SPEAKER_00: I sit both and down and say, listen, this is where we're at.
SPEAKER_00: This is, this is, I need you to look, I need you to see where we are.
SPEAKER_00: This is the building that we're by, this is the this is the lifeguard stand that we're by.
SPEAKER_00: And as we're out there in the ocean, they're rolling around, the waves are crashing.
SPEAKER_00: Eventually, inevitably, what's what will happen is the current will pull them one direction or the other, it'll pull them away from our family's spot.
SPEAKER_00: And from time to time, I'll have to get their attention and pull them to the shore because they're too little, they're too small, they can't swim against it.
SPEAKER_00: And I have to pull them to the shore, and we'll have to walk, get back to the sand, and we'll walk back to our spot.
SPEAKER_00: And that is the image that the Bible has for us.
SPEAKER_00: Return to the Lord, come back to your home base.
SPEAKER_00: If you've wandered from the things that you've known, if you've wandered from the teachings of Christ, if you find yourself separated from God's design and you know better, come home.
SPEAKER_00: If you're not giving your all in worship, if you're not connecting what happens in here with what happens out there, it's time to come home.
SPEAKER_00: It's time to return to the things that you know.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are here for the very first time.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you are hearing this for the very first time.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have anything to return to.
SPEAKER_00: But there's something in your heart that says, Hey, I need a home to come back to you.
SPEAKER_00: That's Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Number four on your notes.
SPEAKER_00: Trust Jesus, he's coming.
SPEAKER_00: Trust Jesus, he is coming.
SPEAKER_00: Chapter 4, verse 1.
SPEAKER_00: For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant, all the evildoers will be stubborn.
SPEAKER_00: The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.
SPEAKER_00: But for you who fear my name, the Son of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings.
SPEAKER_00: He's looking to the future now.
SPEAKER_00: He's looking, he's he's he's looking to the future, to the to the time when the people of Israel will return to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Well, they're well though they're he's looking to the future, not just return to the Lord, but but to the to the coming Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: He said, For you who fear my name, the son of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings, and you shall go out leaping like calves from the stall, and you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day when I act, says the Lord of hosts.
SPEAKER_00: Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statues and rules that I commanded you, commanded him at Horeb before all of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet.
SPEAKER_00: Elijah is already come.
SPEAKER_00: Who's he talking about?
SPEAKER_00: He's talking about John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_00: Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes, and he will turn the hearts of the father to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.
SPEAKER_00: Malachi closes the book and he closes the Old Testament by focusing our attention on Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Christ, who is the ultimate sacrifice for our sins.
SPEAKER_00: We don't bring lambs and goats to worship anymore, spotless or pure, lame or sick, because Jesus was crucified on the cross for all the sins of the world.
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus wants to turn the hearts of the Father back to the hearts of the children, the hearts of the children to the Father.
SPEAKER_00: About to sing a song.
SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that we're going to sing is when Satan tempts me to despair and tells me of the guilt within, upward I look and I see him there who made an end of all my sin.
SPEAKER_00: Because the sinless Savior died, my sinful soul is counted free.
SPEAKER_00: For God the just is satisfied to look on him and pardon me.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus did come.
SPEAKER_00: He really was crucified, dead, buried, and raised to life.
SPEAKER_00: And right now, the Bible says he is seated at the right hand of the Father.
SPEAKER_00: And the Bible says that one of the things that he is doing is he is interceding for us to the Father so that we cannot just be Christian-ish.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus didn't come and die on the cross and be crucified and shamed and mocked and buried and raised from the grade so that we could just be Christian-ish.
SPEAKER_00: He died so that we could have all of it.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord's Supper reminds us of what it costs Jesus on that night.
SPEAKER_00: Reminds us of the shed blood and the broken body of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Reminds us of what we're all as Christians, what we're unified around.
SPEAKER_00: It reminds us of the fact that Jesus is coming again.
SPEAKER_00: Now, we're about to take the Lord's Supper.
SPEAKER_00: The way we do that here at Family Church, we take the Lord's Supper every single week, and we want to uh invite you, if you are a believer in Jesus, if you have been baptized, believers baptism by immersion, to take the Lord's Supper with us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're a member of a different church and you would normally take the Lord's Supper at the church that you attend, but you're with us today as a guest, I want to invite you to take the Lord's Supper as a guest, as part of the worldwide family of God that goes all over the world.
SPEAKER_00: But right now, what I want you to do is to take just a moment to reflect, to pray, to listen to the words of this psalm, to ask God to show you areas of your life, maybe where you've been a little bit Christian ish.
SPEAKER_00: And why don't you resolve today to not be Christian ish anymore, but to take God seriously and to return to the Lord?
SPEAKER_00: As we do that, Pastor Christian, you come and sing as we reflect on Christ.