For Ye Have Robbed Me...

There are two reasons that I am excited about being here today and that is to see you all and to also share a Word from the good book that has the ability to be life-changing. Life-changing in a sense that each person is properly equipped with what they need to make right decisions. There is no other time more important than now to make right decisions. The amount of information that is coming at us today is more frequent, more diverse, more radical, more graphic, than any other time. Right Decisions are paramount.

On average, people make 35000 decisions a day. But unfortunately, not all of them are right decisions. No matter how pious you may be, not all your decisions are right decisions. Therefore, in making right decisions, God gives discernment.

For the christian, that discernment, that right decision making is the decision making process in which a person makes a discovery, a realization that can lead to positive future action. And the Holy Spirit guides us in arriving at that right decision.

Paul says in I Corinthians 2:14 But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

When we are operating from the natural man, the carnal man, the worldly view, we do not understand the Spiritual. It is foreign. It is displaced. It doesn’t mix well. It is contrary to what we normally think for the natural man.

Within our text of study, the book of Malachi presents for us a great revelation, we see a conversation with a broken nation (the natural man) and an all loving God and it brings us to an all important question in Malachi 3:8 which states, “Will a man rob God? Yet ye have robbed me. But ye say, Wherein have we robbed thee? In tithes and offerings.

But These are broad categories that God through Malachi explains in great detail for our learning.

So now here is our setting:

We find an Israel that is publicly confident. Proud of their Jewish heritage. Comfortable in their routines. Comfortable in their possessions. Satisfied with the status quo.

Nevertheless, Israel’s view of themselves did not align with the reality that they had in fact committed spiritual robbery against God.

And if Israel had been willing to listen and think about the question (“Will a man rob God?”) objectively, their response would have been different.

But when you are stubborn to your own spirituality, unaware of your current situation, you do more harm than good.

No matter the signs, the warnings, the writing on the wall (if you will), Israel was literally telling God to “talk to hand.” They were justified in their own eyes. They were okay.

There is a phrase that my wife and I talk about all the time. Yall surprised me and my wife talk. We talk. But that phrase comes from a book “The Story I Tell Myself: How Self Narratives Define Our Identity, Hold Us Back and How We Can Change Them” by Peter Ash.

The story that Israel told themselves, that narrative that they shared about themselves was the reason for their blindness. They told themselves they were safe. They told themselves that they had time. They told themselves that they would be okay.

So If I don’t know I am doing you wrong, I will do it again. But If I know I am doing you wrong, I have a chance to correct it and make it right.

The question is “What if the person you think you are is actually holding you back from who you could truly be and preventing you from achieving your best potential?”

How was this denial holding them back, they thought they were okay. They thought their relationship was in a good place.

There are people that call themselves christians today that think they are okay but have told themselves that “Once saved, Always saved.”

That’s not right.

For you have to work hard for it:

Philippians 2:12 Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.

For you have to fight for it:

Jude 3 Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly fight for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.

For you can lose it and it can be taken away:

Jude 5 I will therefore put you in remembrance, though ye once knew this, how that the Lord, having saved the people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed them that believed not.