From time to time I put sermons I give up here. Not because I think they are particularly good, even less that they are model sermons. I can't even guarantee that I agree with everything I said then - I am (of course) learning all the time. But someone may be interested.
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I'm going to tell you this morning why this church is the best group to belong to anywhere. It's better than any football team, local or national. It's better than any dance or music group. It is even better than the WI or the Scouts.
I have four Sundays left with you before we head up north, so I have to decide what message I would like to leave you with as the time comes to move on. If you've been with us for any length of time, hopefully you have by now observed that as I prepare for a Sunday morning, I don't sit down and say, "What would I like to say on Sunday?" nor even, "Here's the Bible reading that will be read during the service—what would I like to say based on that reading?"
Perhaps like me you long for good times to return again: the opportunity to take a holiday whenever, wherever you wish; the opportunity to meet with friends, any number of people, indoors or outdoors; the opportunity to forget face masks, to sit closer than two meters to somebody from another household. Perhaps you long for good times to return.
If you do picture for a moment the Jews of Jesus' day. they longed for good times to return.
We’ve reached today the end of the book of the prophet Malachi, written about the year 400 b.c., two and a half thousand years ago. You will remember that the Malachi prophesied in the city of Jerusalem that had been rebuilt after the people had returned from their exile to Babylon. The temple and the city walls were rebuilt, but then nothing much had happened for over a hundred years, and the people were beginning to doubt that God really loved them. So their response to God was becoming increasingly half-hearted.
Let me begin by asking you a question. What do you think being a Christian is like? On balance, when you weigh up the pros and cons, is it in your advantage to be a Christian? Is it a good thing or is it overall a bad thing to do?
I've heard it said that when someone becomes a Christian, the last part of them to be converted is frequently their wallet. That was just as true in ancient Israel as it is today.
A sermon given on Remembrance Sunday 2020, from Ephesians 2:14-22
Do you ever look at the world, and everything that is broken within it, all the bad stuff that there, is the people who do horrendously bad things – and wonder why God does not fix it. Why does he not stamp out all the bad things? Why does he not intervene, and take off the stage of this world all the people who do really awful things?
The people of Malachi’s day had got tired of God. Or rather, they suspected God had got tired of them. I won’t recap the history in full this morning. I’ve shared the historical background of the book of Malachi on a number of weeks recently. suffice to say for today that a hundred years has passed since God did anything to show that he still loves his people, and so they are growing tired and cynical. They’re treating God cheaply. This comes out in a number of ways, but one of them is that they are treating marriage cheaply.
If you were here last week, one of the things I said was that it is important that the people charged with passing on God’s word, God’s message to his people, do not duck or modify the things that God has to say but that are hard for us to accept or hear. Then we come from there to the material before us this morning, and I am immediately met with a passage that it is extremely tempting to skip, and to jump straight from halfway through Malachi 2 to the beginning of chapter 3.