Healing Love

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. So let me just ask you, what does God get from you? Does he get your first and your best or does he get your leftovers? You might make offerings all the time.

Does it cost you? Does your giving to God inconvenience your lifestyle? Welcome to Summit Life, the gospel-centered Bible teaching ministry of J.D. Greer, pastor of the Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. Today, Pastor J.D. challenges us to look at our hearts to see what's motivating our religious activity. Because quite frankly, a lot of people consider themselves religious based on their checklist and busy schedule. They go to church on Sunday, tithe, maybe even read their Bible during the week. But that's not necessarily the same thing as having a real relationship with God. Today we're in the last book of the Old Testament, Malachi, for a message Pastor J.D.

titled Healing Love. My brother-in-law is pretty big into the tech world. And so one of his goals is always to point me to at least one new app that he thinks will improve the quality of my life. And this time he pointed me to an app that gives these really well done 15-minute audio highlights of popular books. Already, I love it because I love to read, but I also love efficiency, which drives my wife crazy because she reads for sheer pleasure.

That woman can get deeply engrossed to the point of tears by what is written on the back of a cereal box, which I admire, but I will frequently get to the end of a book and be like, yeah, that was good, but I probably could have learned that in about 20 minutes. But I say all that because you might think of the book of Malachi as the 15-minute summary of the entire Old Testament. Now, I'm definitely not saying that you should read it and not the rest of the Old Testament, but just that you will find almost every one of the primary Old Testament themes in the book of Malachi.

Malachi 3.7 is what sums up the message of the whole book, and for that matter, sums up the entire Old Testament. Here's what it says, since the days of your fathers, you have turned from my statutes. All the way back in Genesis, going all the way back to Father Abraham, you have turned from my statutes, you have not kept them.

Return to me, says the Lord, and I will return to you. Furthermore, Malachi's book is the last thing that God says to Israel for 400 years. After this time, Israel is gonna enter a period that historians call the silent years, where they're going to receive no word from God at all. The very next time God speaks to them is when Jesus comes. So what Malachi says in this book is going to reverberate in Israel's hearts for 400 years. Malachi is what they are thinking about his message when Jesus shows up on the scene. In this book, we're gonna see first the charge against Israel, then we're gonna see secondly the problem of Israel's persistent unfaithfulness, and then lastly, we're gonna see God's solution. The first of these is the media section, so let's just jump right in to the charge against Israel.

It's got four components to it. Let me give you the context before I spell them out for you. It has been about 170 years since the Israelites have been exiled into captivity in Babylon because of their sin. God had promised them that this captivity was not permanent, and so after 70 years, he kept his word and returned them home again to the promised land. Well, when they came back, they underwent this national revival and they made all these reforms under the leadership of two guys named Ezra and Nehemiah. Within a generation, however, those promises of reform had worn off. What did not wear off, however, was their external commitment to religiosity.

Historians say that Israel would never again lose that commitment to the external religious devotion. They became permanently and irrevocably hyper-religious. This was the time period. Malachi's day was when groups like the Pharisees and the Sadducees first formed with all of their emphasis on external behaviors. These were the groups, of course, that caused Jesus so many problems. The group that he referred to as white-washed tombs who look perfect and pretty on the outside, but on the inside are full of dead men's bones. That all begins in Malachi's day, so these are four charges that he's going to bring against religiously active people who look great on the outside, but hearts are actually pretty cold toward God on the inside.

Now, let me give you a warning as if you needed to hear it after the other amount of prophets. These are going to be a little painful. They're going to be a little painful. Most of them are going to hit really close to home for us. In fact, some of them are downright offensive because Malachi is going to get all up in our business. He's going to get personal. I hope you make it, honestly, all the way through this message.

I was a little afraid as I was going through this. People are going to walk out. One of our campus pastors said this week, do people actually walk out during sermons? I told him it happens all the time.

You just can't see it because I'm standing up here and I guess you're not. In fact, I remember there was one lady sitting in the second row and she obviously did not like what I was saying. Eventually, she just stood up and just made a kind of a little scene and she was getting all the way out and she goes out the side over there.

Then the worst part was about three or four minutes later, I guess she realized she'd forgotten her keys. She comes back in and she huffs her way back to the pagan. Anyway, ma'am, if you're back, we welcome you back to the Summit Church. We're glad you're here. Please don't feel obligated to give. We're just glad that you're here.

Anyway, I hope you make it through these. Here they go. These people were religious, but they were self-seeking. They're religious, but they were still self-seeking. In chapter one, Malachi is going to talk about their offerings and he's going to say to them, you make all kinds of offerings, you're always in church, but secretly in your heart when you're making these offerings, secretly you say, what a burden. You bring stolen, lame, or sick animals, you bring this as an offering?

Am I going to accept that from your hands? I am a great king, says the Lord of armies, and the implication is I deserve a great offering and my name will be feared among the nations. In other words, their worship was consistent, it was frequent, it was regular, but it was half-hearted. They gave the lame and the sick from their flocks, things that didn't really cost them, gave them their leftovers, things out of their excess. I had a missionary friend who once told me, he said, you know, when you're a missionary, you constantly have people who come up to you and offer you the leftovers of their lives.

They'll say things like, hey, I got a new computer, here's a 10-year-old one I haven't used in a while, I thought you could have it. He said, you know, you always appreciate them thinking of you, you appreciate their generosity, of course, but you wonder what it says about their heart when they upgrade their houses and their lifestyles first and then offer to God what has little to no value in their lives anymore anyway. So let me just ask you, what does God get from you? Does he get your first and your best or does he get your leftovers? You might make offerings all the time. Does it cost you? Does your giving to God inconvenience your lifestyle?

C.S. Lewis said that was one of the only ways to know that your giving was where it should be, was that it changed your lifestyle. Until it gets to that point, he said, you're not giving him faith and you're certainly not giving in worship. If you come into unexpected money, what is the first thing that it goes to? Does it go first to upgrading your lifestyle or stocking your savings or does God get the first and the best of it?

By the way, don't just think about this in terms of money, think about it in terms of time. One of the reasons that the first thing I do when I get up in the morning is spend time with God in his word and in prayer is I want God to have the first and the best of my day. I don't want to be tucking him in at the margins when I got two minutes here and five minutes here when I'm drifting off to sleep at night.

I want him to have the first and the best. Have you offered him the first and best of your career? I often say this, but there are some of you whose careers could be strategically used in the advance of the gospel. Have you ever offered to him and said, God, just show me where you want it?

Or I say this to college students, but not exclusively to them. Have you ever offered your career and just said, God, I don't want to give to you from the margins of my career. I want to give you the whole thing. God, you show me what you want to do with it. Our offerings toward God ought to make a statement to other people about God's worth to us. I thought of King David this week as I was thinking through this about, you know, at the end of his life, he wanted to make an offering to God just to say thank you for something. And so he wants to build a temple for God and he finds a perfect piece of property to build this temple on. So he goes to the guy who owns it and he says, I want to buy this property for the temple. And the guy says, Hey, I love God too.

You can just have the piece of property. And David says, no, I'm going to pay full market value for this because I will not give to the Lord that which costs me nothing. In other words, it has nothing to do with providing something for God that he needs.

This has to do with me making a statement to God, giving to him my first and my best, because that's the kind of honor God deserves. These people were religious. They fulfilled their offering quota, but they were self-seeking rather than God-honoring. Secondly, they were religious, but letter B, they were self-centered.

Religious but self-centered rather than God-centered. This was demonstrated, listen, this was demonstrated by their behavior in marriage. Watch this.

This is the second thing you do. He said, you cover the Lord's altar with tears, with weeping and groaning because he no longer regards your offering. And you say, why does he not regard our offering?

Because the Lord was witnessed between you and the wife of your youth to whom you've been faithless, though she is your companion and your wife by covenant. Did he not make them one with a portion of the spirit in their union? Didn't he put his spirit into this? And wasn't he the one behind this? And what was the one God seeking?

Godly offspring. The man who does not love his wife, but divorces her says the Lord, the God of Israel, that man covers his garment with injustice. Here's what's happening.

Here's what was happening. If you read back a few verses earlier in chapter two, you'll see that many of the Jewish men had taken a fancy to foreign women. They found them attractive, but these women, they worshiped other gods. And so a lot of these Hebrew men were divorcing and God confronts them about this in two ways. Listen, verse 15, he says, first of all, your marriage was a covenant that you made before me and that covenant was supposed to reflect my love for you.

Do you see how he, the use of the word one that he repeats? I made you one with your spouse and I was the one God who, you know, I'm one and you're supposed to reflect me. Your marriage was a picture of my of my nature of my covenant.

Second, he says, one of my primary intentions in your marriage was to raise up godly children. But you, but you, he says, you have started to look at marriage as if it were all about you. You've started to look at marriage as if it were about fulfilling your needs and wants and desires. Divorce, you see, listen, is often the result of a life that has completely turned in the wrong direction. Divorce is a lot of times not the problem, it's the fruit of the problem. And that problem is a self-centered approach to life that you went into marriage with. People go into marriage looking for somebody to complete them or make them happy or make their, you know, what romantic dreams come true. And when that person quits doing that or when they get difficult to live with or you meet somebody that you think might do it better for you, then you get divorced. That self-centered approach to marriage even affects how we think about children. They think of it in terms of what they want or what will add enjoyment to their lives. That's why a friend of mine says most people don't want a kid, they want an accessory. And so they ask questions like, should we get a kid or should we get a dog? They're not the same thing.

And they're not equivalent or equal. Don't call your dog your fur baby. It's not a human. And do not send me a Christmas card, by the way, with nothing but your dog's face featured on it as if that dog is the center of your family. All right, listen, the cat people at this church already hate me. I thought it was the dog people's turn. You said, well, you just don't like animals.

That's probably fair. You better be glad that I wasn't Noah. If I'd been Noah, it'd pretty much just be me and you sitting here, just so you know that. But the point is, listen, dogs are great, but don't equate them with children. And don't put the value on them that God puts on children that he died to save and that he wants to raise up as a godly generation, his primary purpose for family or one of his primary purposes is children.

And he gives children for the purpose of his kingdom. Now I want to be really, really careful here because I do not want to imply in any way that the number of kids you have is in any way a measure of your godliness, because there can be multiple valid reasons why you choose to have a small family or a large family, or even to have no children at all. But I will say, generally speaking, as a society gets more self-centered, they tend to have less children. That's happening big time in our generation because kids are inconvenient.

They mess up your life. You can say, amen, even if your kids are sitting right next to you, you can say amen, because they know you already think that, right? Listen, I can't judge your heart, but I can ask those of you who are either married or those of you who are thinking about getting married, I can ask you to consider, what's your motive for having kids? Is it to accessorize and add value to your life?

Is it because it completes you and gives you the happy life that you've always thought you wanted to have? Or is your desire to have kids about God's kingdom? How did you determine the number of kids you should have? Was that about you and your wants and desires?

Or was it about God's kingdom? In this area, I'd encourage you to be like my wife and me. After we had three kids, we were like, I don't know, should we have any more? We knew with one hand, three felt like enough.

My quiver felt full at one, just for the record. But we also knew that having and raising godly children was one of the greatest ministries you can have. That's what the Bible tells us. So we're like, well, maybe we should have one more for Jesus. And then we knew the other option was we could get involved in international adoption because it's such a beautiful gospel picture, any kind of adoption. And so we set a day to pray and fast and just ask God what he wanted.

April 29th, 2009. We prayed and fasted the whole day. And at the end of the day, we talked right before we went to bed. It's about 10 30 at night.

And what do you feel? Both of us felt like we were leaning toward international adoption. And I said, all right, next morning, first thing, I'll get this thing rolling.

I'll start getting it set up. We get up next morning. My wife feels nauseous, goes into the bathroom. She comes back out and says, you won't believe this.

I don't think we've ever had God answer a prayer that quickly or that definitively as he just did. And we were doing all the things you weren't supposed to do to get pregnant. But the point was, we're trying to lay this before God and say, God, the shape of our family is not something that we are choosing because it pleases us or because we're trying to accessorize our life. This is about your kingdom. Even marriage and family are not supposed to be about you. When it is about you, then divorce becomes a lot more common and kids become a preference. When I know it's about God, then I'll stick it out in hard times in my marriage because I know that God's name, not my needs is the ultimate thing of importance in my marriage. And see, I know that God can bring himself glory in my marriage by giving me a peaceful, harmonious relationship. But I also know that God can bring himself glory in my marriage by enabling me to love somebody with grace, even when she's difficult, because that's how he loves me.

Just as in Malachi's day, we've got a divorce problem in the religious community and we've got one in this church and it's by and large because we have adopted a self-centered rather than God-centered approach to life. I hear couples all the time who get divorced because they no longer love each other or we realize we never loved each other. That kind of love you're talking about, that's a choice.

What you're saying when you say that is that you encountered things in that person that made them difficult to love. Oh, what, you think you're always easy for God to love, that it's all snuggles and rainbows from him to you? God says in Malachi that he hates divorce because it tells the world a lie about his love. When we divorce because we are no longer getting along or because you are no longer making me happy, we tell the world that God's love is like that, that he loves us based on how sufficiently we meet his needs and that's a lie.

And if that were true, we'd all be in hell. Marriage was supposed to be an earthly picture of God's love when we became one with somebody else the way that God was one with us. I hear of couples who get divorced because of irreconcilable differences. Veronica and I have all kinds of irreconcilable differences and so did Jesus with me, but Jesus loved me anyway and through his persistent grace he changed my heart and now I get a chance in marriage to demonstrate that. Couples don't fall out of love, couples fall out of repentance. They don't falter in their passion for each other, they falter in their worship of God. Their divorce is not usually caused by difficulties in the marriage as much as it is a self-centered rather than God-centered view of life. Now obviously I'm speaking in generalities here, I'm not jumping right into your specific situation, I'm doing what Malachi did and that's what he said, you're self-centered and that shows up in your marriage. Thirdly, they were religious, but let us see, they were unbelieving.

They were religious, but they were unbelieving. You're going to see that in verse 17 chapter two, you have wearied the Lord with your words. Yet you ask, how have we wearied him? You wear him when you say, where's the God of justice? You've spoken arrogantly against me, says the Lord.

This is chapter three. You've said, it's futile to serve God. The arrogant are blessed and the evil doers prosper after all that God had done for them. Y'all, they were still looking around at the world, walking around saying, God, it's not fair. God, how are we supposed to know that you really love us?

God, are you even up there? Keep in mind that God had delivered them from a self-inflicted captivity now, not once, but twice. And God says, still? Still you doubt my commandment to you?

What more would I have to do? I delivered you from Pharaoh's entire army without a single casualty on your side. I led you through the wilderness by a cloud and I gave you food and manna and clothing and water. When you were in the wilderness, I defeated enemies three times your size right in front of you. And then I explained to you, I explained to you that my ways are not like your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts. And that means that sometimes there's going to be things that I do that you can't immediately understand, but you can always trust that I'm present and that I'm working and you can see that by the mighty way I delivered you in the past. But still, still after all that, you say, maybe God, you're not really good. And maybe you're not even there.

Summit church, I often tell you that it is okay for you to ask questions of God and it is, but a persistent failure to trust God wearies Him. I remember hearing the story of a Vietnam soldier, a Marine who was in a foxhole with a guy, a man he met in the army who became a really good friend. They're in the foxhole together and a grenade rolls in and without even thinking, he jumps, he looks at his friend, he jumps on the grenade and he takes the explosion into his body so that he dies and his friend lives. Well, the survivor after the war was over went and found the family of this friend of his who'd been killed. And he went to him and he said, he went to the family and he said, I just wanted to meet you and tell you how much I cared about your son and how much of a friend he was to me.

And after they talked for a while and shared some stories, he said, you know, one thing has bothered me since then. He said, I grew up in a very dysfunctional home. My mom and dad weren't really that present in my life.

I didn't have any brothers and sisters. And he said, your son became like a brother to me. It was like the only family that I had. He goes, and I knew that he had a very healthy family and I just can't help but think that maybe I meant more to him or he meant more to me than I meant to him. And it's been this haunting feeling of maybe the commitment I had to him wasn't really matched. When he wrote home, did he ever mention me and talk about his feelings about his friendship toward me?

And as the story goes, the mother gets really angry and she looks back at this guy and says, how dare you come into our home and insult the memory of our son? Our son gave his life for you. What more would he have to do to prove his commitment to you? It's like J.C. Ryle says, in light of the cross, the greatest insult you could ever give to Jesus is to doubt his love for you. Maybe your doubt never drives you by the way, all the way into unbelief, but maybe your second guessing of God dulls your joy and mutes your worship. You see all that's often how I have been. I've never gone all the way into unbelief, but I have often lacked the warmth of knowing and trusting God as a good, good father to me. And then I experience these moments sometimes where I find it hard to release myself to him fully in worship and I find it hard to trust him in prayer because I can't understand why he would do or not do something the way that I think he should do it. And then I'll have these moments where I hear God say, what more would I have to do to prove myself to you? How could you possibly continue to doubt me? And why do you routinely put my character in question just because you can't understand something at the moment?

Having questions is certainly okay, but at some point we have to stop and choose to believe that God is who he says he is and he did what he said he would do. Now that's a moment of truth. You're listening to Pastor JD Greer and a message titled Healing Love on Summit Life. We will conclude this message next week, but in the meantime, you can listen again or catch up on previous messages in our teaching series when you visit our website, jdgreer.com. So JD, we've spent the past couple of weeks studying a few of the Minor Prophets. This is a section of the Bible that a lot of us probably aren't super familiar with. So what are you hoping listeners will get out of this study?

Okay, Molly, here's a little known fact. I was actually dreading the series through the Minor Prophets, but I thought people in my church would criticize me that I'd never really touched them. So I got into them and just found, I mean, what I knew was going to be true, but had just forgotten that there was so much rewarding gospel, so much about the love of God that just exudes through these Minor Prophets. They're Minor Prophets with a major message.

They're major on the love of God. You see, the gospel is not just something that pops up in the first part of the New Testament. It's, Jesus said, written into literally every single page of the scripture. That's our whole focus at Summit Life. No matter what the subject is, no matter what part of the scriptures we're teaching from, we want to show that the gospel is there.

The whole Bible is the story of God's relentless love in coming after the people that he is saving. And so when you support this ministry financially, you're helping us bring that message of the gospel to more people across the country and even really, Molly, around the world. We got a monthly partner program called Gospel Partners to make it easier for you to be a part of this mission. And so we want to invite you as the listener to partner with us financially. If you're being blessed by this, if you find yourself growing daily in the gospel and wanting other people to be able to experience this, we would invite you to commit to a monthly gift that helps us be able to get these messages and this gospel to people around the country and in other parts of the world.

You can learn more about that and anything else we've talked about today, just go to jdgeer.com. Your regular monthly support makes this all possible and we're so grateful. It's easy to join the Gospel Partner team. Just give us a call and we'll get it all set up for you.

Our number is 866-335-5220. Or if you prefer, you can sign up online at jdgeer.com. As a Gospel Partner, you'll get access to all of the resources we feature throughout the year, including our current resource. It's a 20-day devotional called What is the Gospel? Mention this new book from Pastor JD when you join the Gospel Partner team today or when you make a generous one-time donation.

Call 866-335-5220 or go online to jdgeer.com. I'm Molly Vitovich. Thanks for joining us for another encouraging week of Christ-centered teaching here on Summit Life. Be sure to join us Monday as we wrap up our study of the Minor Prophets right here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.