[Scott Delamater] I'm going to tell you about my first day on my job, my very first job that I had. I showed up, it was my first real career job, right? It was a software job. I was working for this little startup company in Southern California. And I showed up in a dress shirt, and a tie, and slacks because that's what you wore to work. At least, that's what I thought I wore to work. And for about three days, I showed up to work every day in a dress shirt, and a tie, and my slacks, and my boss very politely pulled me into his office and said, "Nobody else here is wearing that. You don't need to dress up to come into the office here." You know, you looked around and people were maybe wearing like a button-up short-sleeve polo shirt, jeans. Maybe the people that were dressed a little nicer had their Dockers on, others were wearing khakis or something. But he said, "You don't need to do that. It's casual attire here. You're fine." So I thought, "Okay. I'll go ahead and try this out."

And so the next day I came in, in my normal clothes, and people kind of side a little sighed of relief, like, "Good. He's not that weirdo." It's interesting because a casual business attire has a longer history in our country than what you might imagine or might realize. It goes all the way back to the 1960s. The 1960s, the Hawaiian Fashion Guild, they were trying to figure out how to sell more shirts. And so, they gave two Hawaiian shirts, two Aloha shirts to every member of the State Congress and State Senate. They were trying to get them to accept these Hawaiian shirts as part of the normal garb that people should be allowed to wear because of the heat in Hawaii and the humidity, and it's simply more comfortable. And it caught on. And so, members of Congress on Fridays, they would come into work wearing their Hawaiian shirts. And these became known as Aloha Fridays by 1966 or so. And so this was sort of… When it was… It started to pick up.

At the same time in Hewlett Packard, in California, they had started doing something that they were calling Blue Sky days on Fridays. It was intended to promote blue-sky thinking, big thinking, right? Think outside the box kind of thing. And as part of that, they had this policy where you could wear casual clothing on Fridays. So the rest of the week, you would come, you know, in your suit coat, and your tie, and everything but on Fridays, you could wear something casual, right? It was to promote this sort of out-of-the-box thinking.

And this kind of started picking up, and people gradually adopted these sort of weird, casual policies, mostly on Fridays, but then in the '80s and then early '90s, it kind of evolved into this sort of casual business wear but companies started having problems because people took casual to mean just about anything, from ripped jeans, and their paint clothes, and tank tops to, you know, slightly nicer apparel. And so there was really… There wasn't this really good understanding of, like, what does casual wear look like in the workplace?

In 1992, Levi's, the jeans company, who also sells Dockers, they created this guide to business wear to help companies define their policies. And they distributed this guide to about 25,000 different HR departments across the company or across the country. And these HR departments were so relieved to have something with pictures to be able to give to people to say, "This is what casual wear looks like. This is what's going to be okay for you to wear. Not this other crazy stuff that some of you are wearing here. Make it look more like this." And of course, that was great for Levi's sales because it had all sorts of Levi's clothing in it.

Then came the 2000s, and then the 2000s, the software industry somehow became the definitive fashion statement, which I think is hilarious because growing up as a little bit of a computer nerd, nobody would have ever, ever suspected that me and my kind would have anything to do with fashion statements. But that's how it came. You might remember Steve Jobs in his jeans and black turtlenecks, his black sweaters that he would wear. And policies became very casual. Workplace clothing became very casual, in general, to the point that in my career, I don't think I've ever worked at a place that has required a button-up shirt even, much less a tie. And here we are in 2020, where now we're just down to sweat pants, and maybe whatever is going to look good on Zoom. It's sort of the mullet attire, right? It's business up top and it's party on the bottom. And so, we're just all the way too casual now. I mean, we wear whatever we wear.

And you're saying, "Why am I getting a history lesson on casual work attire on the Sabbath?" Casual permeates our entire culture. Fashion is something that, for better or for worse, says a lot about a culture. It's one piece of that. And so it exposes some side of what we value, of what we want to present, of what we want to put out there as a culture. It's not just fashion, though, that has become more and more casual since the '60s. I think everybody, looking back, you can see and sort of agree that attitudes about all sorts of things have become more and more casual since the 60s. Everything's become a little more casual. Meals have become more casual, right?

It's very rare that you sit down at a meal anywhere where you have, you know, a formal place setting. You have to spend big bucks to go to a restaurant that's going to have a formal place setting, sitting down in front of you. And it's not something we typically do in our homes. We don't tend to pull the China down for every meal. We don't have formal meals. I think our most formal meal of the year is usually the Night to be Much Observed. And that's the day that china comes out. Most other days, you know, the really nice stuff stays put away. So we've become very casual about sort of our dining experience.

I've gone to the Symphony a handful of times in the last 10, 20 years. And if you've gone to the Symphony recently, you'll probably notice that there are a whole bunch of people who are basically in Steve Jobs attire, wearing jeans, and a sweater to the Symphony, whereas 20, 30, 40 years ago, it was almost exclusively suits. Everything's become casual. Relationships have become casual. Conversations have become casual, right? Even our notion of friendship has been sort of casualized by Facebook, where you can be friends with people that you haven't seen in 30 or 40 years, just by clicking a button. And so, casual is not just something that relates to our clothing. It's something that can relate to our mindset and to our thinking, and it's something that can creep into our faith. It's something that can creep into how we approach God, and how we approach our calling, and what we believe.

George Barna wrote a book back in 2009, so it's a little bit dated now. But he wrote a book back in 2009, called The Seven Faith Tribes, where at that time, he had done some analysis, and some surveys, and he famously grouped the United States into these different segments based on religious belief. And he grouped Christians into two different groups, one he called "Captive Christians," and one he called "Casual Christians." And the casual Christians made up 66% of the adult population in the United States, 66%. That was back in 2009. So you've got two-thirds of the country, 10 years ago, 11 years ago, that was already considering themselves to be casual Christians, which really was sort of Christians of convenience when Christianity was sort of… it made you feel comfortable. It was good but you didn't really need to be too invested in it. It was a very casual approach to religion.

Since then, last October, the Pew Research Center, they released a study that said, "Since 2009…" So this is since 2009. It says, "Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular, now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009." So we've got a 9% jump in the number of people who just don't identify with any sort of religion, in general. They don't really think about these things. Right? We're increasingly surrounded by a very casual approach to God. Right? The agnostic approach is just sort of, like, "Yeah, maybe." Right? "Does God exist?" "He might. I don't know." But it's a very sort of casual thinking about religion, about God, about why we're here. Barna group, this past January, they said “In a Q&A published in Revising Evangelism… Dr. Mary Healy, Professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, notes, ‘Many people in our time are affected by a kind of spiritual numbness… They often seem to have lost interest in the most important questions of life: Why do I exist? What is my mission in life and how do I fulfill it? What is true love and how do I find it?" So people have just become more and more casual about these big questions, about religion, in general, about what it is that we’re… why we're even here, why we exist.

But this, of course, is not new. Right? We're not seeing this for the first time in history. This is something that has ebbed and flowed over time. There have been big religious movements, where people have taken faith seriously. And then there has been these sort of ebbs, where people just don't really think as much about it. They don't have as much zeal or as much passion about it, kind of just sort of dies off. It tapers off. And people become very sort of low-key, very casual about things, distracted by other things, more interested in other big events than they are in what God has called us to be. So we're going to look at an example in the Bible because we actually have a really fantastic parallel here that we can draw. Let's go over to the book of Malachi.

We'll spend most of our time in the book of Malachi today, the very last book in the Old Testament. The setting of the book of Malachi, it's a little hard to pinpoint exactly when it was written because Malachi doesn't say, like, so many of the other prophets will say, "In the year of King so and so…" Right? He doesn't do that. So he doesn't give us a year to really pinpoint it. But we know based on some of the clues, some of the wording that he uses in his message that this was somewhere after the exiles had returned to Jerusalem after the temple had been built, maybe 60, 70 years after the temple has been built. So, you can imagine the exiles had come back. They had rebuilt Jerusalem. They had rebuilt its walls. There had been some excitement around that. And then 70 years pass, right, from here, looking back, that would be 1950. For those of you who have that in living memory, it's a good jump back. Right? For those of us who don't, we know the history back around then, and we can sort of think back, and think, "Yeah, that seems like a really different time or really different world." Seventy years have passed.

And so here they are, 70 years down the road after the temple, and we find them in a state where they are not exactly the most zealous. They're not exactly on fire for things. They have become very casual about how they approach God and how they relate to God. They exhibit some of these same lax qualities that we observe today. The things that we observe outside the Church and inside the Church, they have some of these same qualities. The parallels are pretty apparent. And the lessons that Malachi has for us are very relevant. The book of Malachi is interesting because it's posed as a series of questions and answers between God and the people. And so, he'll make a statement and they'll say, "Well, what do you mean by that?" And then he clarifies, and he explains, and he teaches. So we'll go through some of the questions, the words that he uses, that he puts in their mouths even. We'll see what God has to say about being casual and we'll see what it is we can do about it. Things that we can be on the alert for, things that we can look out for, and then we'll see the solution that he really identifies here for us as a way to make sure that we are not being casual in our approach to God.

Let's start at Malachi 1. Malachi 1:1 says, "The burden of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. ‘I have loved you,’ says the Lord, ‘Yet you say, “In what way have You loved us?” Was not Esau Jacob's brother?' Says the Lord, 'Yet Jacob I have loved; but Esau I have hated, and laid waste his mountains and his heritage for the jackals of the wilderness.’" The context here is they're looking at God and they're saying, "How have You loved us? What do You mean?" Esau, the Edomites are descendants of Esau. And in the next couple of verses, he's going to talk about the Edomites. The Edomites had been part of… They had collaborated with the book Babylonians in destroying Jerusalem. When the Babylonians had come in and wiped Jerusalem out, the Edomites were right there with them, tearing it down.

And so, the Edomites, there was this kind of sting about the Edomites, that they really kind of despised the Edomites. But they were there their neighbors to the South, you might say. But God here in verse 4, He says, "Even though Edom has said, 'We have been impoverished, but we will return and build the desolate places…'" Because they had been impoverished. They had been run out of their land, and they had been conquered by the Nabateans. "Thus says The Lord of hosts: 'They may build, but I will throw down; they shall be called the Territory of Wickedness, and the people against whom the Lord will have indignation forever.’" He says, 'If you look outside of your borders, you can see what happens to nations that do not have My favor.'" Here we see that they were being casual about God's favor. They were being casual about God's blessings. That's our first point, our first lesson we want to look at. They were being very casual about God's favor.

God had favored Israel. Remember, He had favored them in bringing them back into the land, in helping them to rebuild and protecting them so that they could rebuild the wall and rebuild the temple. It was by His divine purpose that the decree had been issued, that they could come back and they could rebuild. And it was His blessing that enabled them to be there, that enabled them to thrive there. And here, they're saying, "How have you loved us?" And He says, "Look outside. Look beyond your borders. And you'll see what happens to people who are not favored by Me. You'll see what happens to people that don't have that protection. They get run off. They get trampled. Their nations are laid waste."

Here in our nation, if you want to start drawing this forward and draw this principle forward, and draw the parallels, our nation is largely ignorant of the fact that it is the recipient of God's blessings, that it's God's blessings through Abraham, that have caused us to be such a rich and amazing place, the richest nation in the world, perhaps the richest the world has ever seen. And our nation doesn't see it. We can take it for granted. We take for granted that we have had God's favor for so long. We just sort of come to expect it. This is normal. This sort of richness and the abundance that we have, and all the amazing things, and the opportunities that we have, these are things that are directly from God, that God has blessed us with. And if we look beyond our borders, if we're willing to do that, I mean, we can look beyond and we can see, "Oh, well. This is what it looks like in nations where you don't have that, where God has not shown favor, where God has not blessed in the way that He's blessed here."

And so, we can take it for granted. And as a nation, we can look and we can say, "How have You loved us?" But if we understand, and we look back, and we see historically how these blessings have flowed down to us, we can see that God has loved us. If we want to take it and make it even more personal, as His holy nation, as His holy people, we can look at it and we can say, "God has done so much for us, individually, the calling that we have, the favor that God has granted us, we sometimes refer to as his grace, these things are amazing blessings that God has poured out on us." He has loved us. And I think we generally recognize that. But sometimes we don't always have that at the front of our minds. Sometimes it's not always the thing that's really fueling us, that's really driving us forward. But we have God's favor.

When we look in verse 2, and we read, and it says, "'I have loved you,' says the Lord," I think we can take that very personally because He has loved us so very much. So we should make sure that we are not being casual in any sort of way, that God's favor is shown to us, that God's grace toward us, about our calling that we have, right? It's something that we need to be very serious about. We'll talk about being serious. When I say serious, I don't mean, we've got to have this furrowed brow and be very somber, and very sullen, but serious in the sense of understanding the gravity of something, serious in understanding the weight and the purpose that we have in front of us. When we can take things seriously, in that sense, right, that's the opposite of being casual. When we're casual, it's just sort of, treat this thing like it's sort of a light thing. It's a small thing. Maybe it's a big deal today and maybe it won't be a big deal tomorrow. But when we can be serious about something, that's going to be one of our remedies to being overly casual.

Let's continue in Malachi 1, and we'll see the next thing that they were casual about in verse 6. My heading here says “Polluted Offerings.” But what we'll see here is that the priests because now he's going to turn his attention directly to the priests, the priests were being casual about service. They were being casual about how they served God, and their main functions and the main things that they did, offerings are one of the main things that they were responsible for. They were being casual about their service to God. So we'll see that here in verse 6. "'A son honors his father? And a servant his master. If I then am the Father, where is My honor? And if I am a Master, where is My reverence? says the Lord of hosts to you priests who despise My name, yet you say, 'In what way have we despised Your name?’"

So here's the question, they say, "What? How have we despised Your name? Kind of, I don't see it. I don't know what you're talking about." And tells them in verse 7, "You have offered defiled food on My altar, but say, ‘In what way have we defiled You?’ By saying the table of the Lord is contemptible." Now, they were not necessarily saying these things outright but God's putting these words there in their mouths to demonstrate what was in their hearts, to demonstrate what their actions were showing, that they were treating God's table, as though it was contemptible.

Verse 8, He explains further, He says, "When you offer the blind as a sacrifice, is it not evil?" They were bringing blind animals, maimed animals, and offering those as sacrifices to God. “'And when you offer the lame and the sick, is it not evil? Offer them to your governor! Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you favorably?’ says the Lord of hosts. Again, offerings were one of their main forms of service toward God, and between God and the people. And here, they're bringing the lame, and the maimed, and these animals that God says, "You wouldn't even want to present these to somebody as a gift." Anybody would be offended by this thing, this lame animal that you want me to somehow take and be honored by. But they were exhibiting very lacks obedience because God has laws about what animals were to be offered, about how they were to serve, the ways in which they were to serve. And they were being lax in their obedience.

Verse 11, “'From the rising of the sun, even to it's going down, My name shall be great among the Gentiles; in every place incense shall be offered to My name, and a pure offering. And My name shall be great among the nations,’ says the Lord of hosts.” The priest was supposed to lead in proclaiming His greatness and demonstrating it, but instead, here we see that they dishonored Him. God says that His name will be great among the nations. And it's kind of this contrast that here, it would be great among the nations but it's not good enough for them to bring their best. Verse 12, "But you profane it, in that you say, ‘The table of the Lord is defiled; And its fruit, its food, is contemptible.’" Verse 13, "You also say, 'Oh, what a weariness!’" Some translations, it says, "You say, 'How tiresome!' And you insult Me, says the Lord of armies. 'And you bring the stolen, the lame, and the sick; thus you bring an offering! Should I accept this from your hand?' says the Lord. 'But cursed be the deceiver who has in his flock a male, and takes a vow, but sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished.’" So here they were knowingly keeping aside the good ones for themselves, and then offering blemished animals.

Verse 14, He says, "'For I am a great King,' says the Lord of hosts, 'And My name is to be feared among the nations.'" He has to call out to them that He is a great king, just to remind them of this, that He is one to be honored and one to be feared. They failed in their offerings, in their sacrifices, in the service that they would bring to God. They treated it as though it wasn't really all that important, how you worshiped Him, and what you brought before Him. You can kind of worship, however, you want to, however it works for you. That's sort of the equivalent that we hear today. Right? You can worship God but sort of in whatever form. We can keep this day or that day. You can do these things and celebrate however you like, as long as it's kind of from your heart and you're doing it for the glory of God. But God says, "No, that's not how it works." He has laws around how He's to be worshipped and how He's to be honored, and the things that we're to offer and the things that we're to sacrifice.

Let's go over to Hebrews 13. Hebrews 13:15, this talks a little bit about our offerings and our sacrifices. So anytime we hit some of these passages in the Old Testament where it talks about the priesthood, there are lessons for us knowing that we are being prepared for that kind of role in God's Kingdom. Anytime we see those expectations of priests talked about in the Old Testament, we can kind of translate that forward and look at the principles there because those things apply to us in that future role. So when we read about offerings, we read about sacrifices, there are things that we should be very connected to.

Hebrews 13:15 says, "Therefore by Him let us continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God, that is the fruit of our lips, giving thanks to His name." So here's one of our offerings that we're supposed to offer is the fruit of our lips, our praise. Well, so, you think about the different ways that we do that. One of the most obvious ones is here when we come together, and we sing, right, and we sing hymns before God. We have an opportunity to praise Him with the fruit of our lips, right? This is not about the quality of your voice. This is not about how well you can sing. This is about coming and bringing praise to God, being able to raise a noise to him, right, and honor him in the best way that we possibly can. I know at times in my life, it's been easy to sort of come and take that hymn service for granted and, like, "All right, well, maybe I'm looking forward to hearing this speaker. And why did you choose all these long hymns? And you chose all these five verse hymns. And let's hurry up. Let's get to the message." Right? But hymns are one of these opportunities that we have to use the fruit of our lips to praise God. Right? It shouldn't be something that we can say, "Oh, how tiresome, right? Oh, what a burden." It should be something that we get to come and do, we get to come and bring before God. And of course, the fruit of our lips can praise God in other ways, in our conversations, in our prayers. Let's talk about that in a second.

Let's go to verse 16 of Hebrews 13. It says, "But do not forget to do good and to share, for with such sacrifices God is well pleased." Here, Hebrews talks a lot, of course, about the sacrifices that the priests offered. And here He talks about the sacrifices that we're to bring. It says that doing good and sharing are some of those sacrifices that we're supposed to bring. Now that's pretty general. Those terms there are pretty general, doing good and sharing. Those are the things that are our sacrifices, being able to share of our possessions, to share of our time, to share of our thoughtfulness with others, to be able to come in and contribute however we can, to be able to share with others, to do good to those around us, right? Other Scriptures talk about doing “good to all, especially those of the household of faith.” So being able to do good, that's a sacrifice that we can bring. Romans 12 talks about our lives being sacrifices before God. And so, we have this opportunity to come and to serve in that way. Let's turn over to Revelation 5:8 real fast.

Revelation 5:8, here, we're getting a little glimpse of John's vision and we're seeing some symbolic things. But Revelation 5:8, it says, "Now when He had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each having a harp, and the golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints." Incense is one of the offerings that God talks about with the priests, right, that they were kind of just going through these rote motions. And here we get this symbol connecting incense with our prayers, that our prayers are like that incense, that sweet smell that goes before God. It's one of those things that we offer, in a sense. It's one of our sacrifices. It's a sacrifice of time, and it's a sacrifice of thoughtfulness and words that we bring before God. And it's an opportunity that we have to praise Him, to be able to thank Him for things.

And that's part of our service. That's one of the things that we get to come and offer. So those are the service opportunities that we have, that we shouldn't be casual about. We should be excited about, that we should be diligent about. We should be able to come and sing before God. We should be able to serve each other every weekend. We should be able to pray to God gratefully, not in a, "oh, how tiresome" kind of way, but in a way that really understands how serious it is that we get to serve the great God of the universe. Because He is a great King is what He says, and we have a great privilege to be able to serve that great King. Let's go back to Malachi 2.

Malachi 2, here He continues talking to the priests. So again, He's talking to the priests and we can sort of think about this and internalize this as knowing our future role, knowing our role as priests. He has some pretty lofty goals for the priests in here. We'll just warn you that ahead of time. There's some pretty lofty goals. Malachi 2:1, "'And now, O priests, this commandment is for you. If you will not hear, and if you will not take it to heart, to give glory to My name,' says the Lord of hosts, 'I will send a curse on you,’" So He goes through… We're going to skip over some of the cursings but He says, "I will send a curse on you." Verse 4, "'Then you shall know that I have sent this commandment to you, that My covenant with Levi may continue,' says the Lord of hosts. 'My covenant was with him, one of life and peace.'" So He's going to summarize His relationship with Levi, with the priesthood, sort of over history over time. Obviously, there were some exceptions. There were some not so great priests, but He's summarizing and saying, "Here's my relationship with Levi and with the priesthood."

"My covenant was with him, one of life and peace, and I gave them to him that he might fear Me; so he feared Me and was reverent before My name. The law of truth was in his mouth, and injustice was not found on his lips. He walked with Me in peace and equity, and turned many away from iniquity." Again, this is sort of that summary of His relationship. And then He tells us what His intention is for the priesthood. Here's the goal. "For the lips of a priest should keep knowledge, and people should seek the law from his mouth; for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts." That's the goal. That's our goal, even, right? We should have absolute truth on our lips at all times. Even in the small things, the things that come out of our mouth should be truth.

In Malachi's time, that was not the case. Verse 8, "'But you have departed from the way; you've caused many to stumble at the law. You've corrupted the covenant of Levi,' says the Lord of hosts." They caused stumbling by their teaching. They were supposed to teach the people how to follow God, and they instead were causing the people to stumble. They were a roadblock. They were preventing them from being able to follow God. They were doing the opposite. Verse 9, "Therefore I have also made you contemptible and base before all the people, because you have not kept My ways but have shown partiality in the law." Showing partiality is evidence of a sort of casual approach to God. Part of their job as priests was to sit in judgment. They were supposed to judge between people, judge between cases and issues. And showing partiality is a way of saying, "It's not really a big deal." Right?

Imagine if you were a judge, and you're taking your job very seriously, knowing that you have to have good rationale and good backing for every single decision that you make. And if you're taking it seriously, that's your thought and your approach. If you're not, you can go, "Well, I don't know. I kind of like where he's coming from. This guy's more kind of my style. I think we'll rule in his favor." It's a very casual thing if you're just sort of showing partiality or if you're able to be bribed or swayed by things that are irrelevant. So they were being very casual in their teaching and casual in their approach to God.

But it says, "The lips of a priest should keep knowledge and people should seek the law from his mouth." Do people…? Now, that's a little bit different for us today. I don't know that we necessarily really expect people to come seek the law from our mouths. When you go to your job, when you go off to school, when you interact with people in your community, I don't know that people would necessarily come and say, "Teach me the law. I'm seeking the law of God from your lips. Please tell it." And it doesn't quite work that way. But still in the things that we say, in the way that we talk, we are able to sometimes lay down some principles, right? Explain why we act a certain way, why we think a certain way, why we would or wouldn't do something. People do seek advice from us from time to time. And when we're able to take whatever advice we have and connect it back to godly principles because that is our absolute source of truth. When we're able to do that, we're starting to fulfill this role that God has intended for His future priests. That's the goal. It's a lofty one. It's a big one. But it's something that we can aspire to, that we can strive for. And if we're not being casual about our approach to God, if we are serious about our approach to God, this is something that we will be able to start working into our conversation.

Let's continue, Malachi 2:10, He's still addressing the priests here. And here He's going to talk about relationships. They were casual about relationships. Malachi 2:10, "Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously with one another by profaning the covenant of the fathers? Judah has dealt treacherously, and an abomination has been committed in Israel and in Jerusalem, for Judah has profaned the Lord's holy institution which He loves: he has married the daughter of a foreign god." So He's talking about the priests and He says the priests had married foreign women. Now, the problem there is that the priests especially were commanded not to marry foreign women because they weren't to be influenced by any foreign religion.

They weren't to be influenced by pagan ideas. And here, the priests had gone out and they had actually married pagan women. And so some of those ideas probably start seeping in. When they're being pulled this other direction, it's easy to start compromising. It's easy to start being casual about your approach to God because you've got pressure from this other side that maybe you shouldn't be so serious about it. But that's what they were doing. They were being… In modern parlance, we were saying they were marrying outside the Church. But this was not about intermarriage in terms of ethnicities. This was marrying people who did not believe the same thing that you believed. This was marrying the daughter of a foreign god as it's put.

Verse 12, "May the Lord cut off from the tents of Jacob the man who does this, being awake and aware, yet who brings an offering to the Lord of hosts! And this is the second thing you do: You cover the altar of the Lord with tears, with weeping and crying,” one of the commentaries I read so that it's more that they caused the altar of the Lord to be covered with tears. It's not that they were… The language here is not that they were repentant and sorrowful, and that they were coming in and weeping before God, but they were actually causing the altar to be covered with tears because God wasn't accepting their offerings because the priests who offered them were profane. "So He does not regard the offering anymore, nor receive it with goodwill from your hands."

So people would come and bring their offerings, and God would not accept them. Somehow they knew that and it made them sad, "Yet you say, ‘For what reason?’ Because the Lord has been witness between you and the wife of your youth, with whom you have dealt treacherously; she's your companion and your wife by covenant. But did He not make them one, having a remnant of the Spirit? And why one?” Here's the clincher for us. “He seeks godly offspring. Therefore take heed to your spirit, and let none of you deal treacherously with the wife of his youth. For the Lord God of Israel says that He hates divorce, for it covers one's garment with violence."

When you look at… He's addressing two things here, right? He's addressing intermarriage and he's addressing divorce. He's touching on both of these relationship issues. And the reason that He's got such a big problem with both of them is that He says they don't produce what is godly. They don't produce godly offspring. And that's what He wanted. He wants godly offspring. That's really His whole plan if you think about it and you sum it up. He wants godly offspring. Obviously, intermarriage, right, when you have one believing parent and one unbelieving parent or divorce when one parent is here and one parent is there, that creates some real conflict for children. That creates some problems. And he says, "The problem here is that we're producing something that might not produce godly offspring."

It's interesting. There's an August 2020 Pew Research poll. So this is fairly recent. It says that over… This kind of blew me away. Over “Half of Christians say that casual sex — defined in the survey as sex between consenting adults who are not in a committed romantic relationship — is sometimes or always acceptable.” Over half say that that is sometimes or always acceptable. Kind of mind-blowing, right? And perhaps we don't go that far with this. Perhaps we don't jump to that extreme. But in all of these cases, what it's talking about is a casual approach to relationships. There's this element of disposability in a relationship, that comes when you're being casual about relationships. But that this relationship that you're a part of, we can get rid of it. Right? Whether that's somebody you're married to, somebody you're not married to, whatever it is. And God says that relationships need to be chosen carefully, for one, and they need to be chosen on the grounds of what they will produce.

And if we look at all of our relationships that way, our friendships, right, our marriages, if we look at our relationships in terms of what they're producing or what they will produce in us and in the other person, right, what do our relationships produce? There's a fantastic way for us to evaluate relationships. And it will keep us from being overly casual about them. Do they produce godliness or do they produce something else? And that's how we can evaluate those things. See if we're being serious about those things. Let's keep going. Malachi 3:8, this one's probably familiar.

Malachi 3:8, "Will a man rob God? Yet you have robbed Me! But you say, 'In what way have we robbed You?' In tithes and offerings. You are cursed with a curse, for you have robbed Me, even this whole nation." Now, it's interesting because here He's going to talk to them about obedience. They haven't been obeying His law and He goes to tithes. And it's one of those things where He's not going to tithes because He needs the money or because He needs the food. Right? God obviously doesn't need that. God can provide. So, of all the things that they were disobeying on, why does He call out tithes? I think when we think about God's law, when we think about why we obey God's law, and why we love it so much, it's because it teaches us about His mind, it teaches us about His character. It teaches us about who He is. When we follow it, we learn these things about His character. We learn about His attributes. And tithing teaches us that God is a giver. It teaches us this major feature of God's character, which is giving. And so, here they were not willing to give. They were unwilling to give of what they had, of what God had already given them, and they were unwilling to give back.

And so He calls them out for that. Verse 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.'" He's basically saying, "Reflect My character, and I'll show it to you back in abundance. I'll show you just…" He would show just how much of a giver that He is. Right? He just said, do your part, give, and then He would reflect it back in more than you could possibly imagine. And I think those of us that have tested Him in this, you've seen it in your life. You give to God what He commands to give and He gives back so much. Let's go to verse 13.

Verse 13, here's sort of summarizes the people's sentiment. Malachi 3:13 says, "'Your words have been harsh against Me,' says the Lord, 'yet you say, “What have we spoken against You?” You have said it is useless to serve God; what point is it that we have kept His ordinance, and that we have walked as mourners before the Lord of hosts? So now we call the proud blessed, for those who do wickedness are raised up; they even tempt God and go free.'" And if that doesn't sound like a modern sentiment, I don't know what does. It feels like that summarizes so much of what we see on display in society. And what's the point of serving God? The idea here in verse 14, “that we have walked as mourners before the Lord.”

Robert Alter's Commentary says, "The idea is contrition in the presence of God, which, according to these naysayers, is pointless.” Right? They're almost saying contrition repentance is worthless. What is the point of that? Expositors Bible Commentary on this verse says, "By innuendo, if not by outright statement, God was represented as unfair and the keeping of the law as a useless exercise." Robert Alter calls it a moral calculus. They did this moral calculus. "Well, you know, if I keep God's law, then there should be this certain return on it. And if I don't see the return, then keeping it is not worthwhile." You could sum it up as, you know, it doesn't really matter. It doesn't really matter if I keep God's law. It doesn't really matter this calling that we have. This is not too important. I don't need to take it too seriously. But we do. We do need to take it seriously. And God shows us how.

The solution is in verse 16. Malachi 3:16, "Then those who feared the Lord spoke to one another,” the fear of the Lord is that seriousness that we were talking about earlier. The fear of the Lord is understanding the gravity of what we've been called to, of who we serve. Understanding just how incredible our God is, and being able to approach Him with the seriousness that He deserves. That's the fear of the Lord. And it says, "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." Right? This is seriousness.

It's not, you know, "Let's walk around, and we'll just all be very somber and very serious. And everything that we say, has to be in these low tones and be very serious about what we do." Right. Jesus Christ wasn't that way. Jesus Christ was very serious about His mission and His purpose but you don't get the sense that He was this kind of a downer to be around. On the contrary. It says that those who fear God encourage each other. They talk to each other. And God hears that. And we should take courage in that, knowing that when we talk to each other about these things, when we encourage each other, about this calling that we have, then God hears it, and says He records that.

Verse 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.'" He compares this to a family relationship, right? A child who's reflecting the character in the family. That's what He compares it to. We have to be serious in serving Him, especially in the small things in the small matters. Verse 18, "Then you shall again discern between the righteous and the wicked, between one who serves God and one who does not serve Him." Again, this is in the context. He says, "On the day that I make them My jewels." He's talking about the future. He's talking about the day that He returns, that it will be evident, who served God and who did not. He will make us His jewels. He will change us into members of His family. We'll be a part of that. Those who serve God, those who fear God, those who do not approach Him casually, but take it seriously.

Malachi 4 says, "For look, the day is coming, burning like a kiln, and when all the arrogant, and all the evildoers shall be straw." Verse 2, "But to you who fear My name shall dawn the Sun of Righteousness with healing in His wings, and you shall go forth and become plump like stall-fed calves. You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes beneath the soles of your feet." That's the future for those who fear God. It all hinges on our fear of God, and how seriously we approach our calling.

Casual Fridays are great. There's nothing wrong with casual. We can still wear sweatpants in our Zoom meetings. That's fine. But as we really during this pandemic, as we lean into being casual as a society, let's stay serious about our calling.