All right, Malachi chapter one. Last week we looked at verses one through five. We'll pick up verse six through the end of the chapter. It is important that you focus on the text because the message needs to be coming from the text this morning. Malachi chapter one, starting at verse six. A son honors his father, and a servant his master. If then I 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? You offer defiled food on my altar, but say, in what way have we defiled you? By saying the table of the Lord is contemptible. And when you offer the blind as a sacrifice, is it not evil? And when you offer the lame and sick, is it not evil? Offer it then to your governor. Would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you favorably, says the Lord of hosts? But now entreat God's favor that he may be gracious to us. While this is being done by your hands, will he accept you favorably, says the Lord of hosts? Who is there even among you who would shut the doors so that you would not kindle fire on my altar in vain? I have no pleasure in you. says the Lord of hosts. Nor will I accept an offering from your hands, for from the rising of the sun, even to its going down, my name shall be great among the Gentiles. In every place, incense shall be offered to my name, and a pure offering for my name shall be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts. But you profane it. In that you say, the table of the Lord is defiled, and its fruit, its food is contemptible. You also say, oh, what a weariness. And you sneer at it, says the Lord of hosts. 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. For I am a great king, says the Lord of hosts, and my name is to be feared among the nations. I want you to imagine standing in the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem during the life of Malachi, and just being a fly on the wall and watching the goings on. There's no doubt, there's a line, there's a queue forming where the priests would daily be ready to receive the sacrifices brought by the people who have come to the temple in order to worship. The people are lined up. Some of them have sheep, lambs. Some of the poorest might have a couple little birds. But they all wait their opportunity to bring their offering to the priests in order to be offered as a sacrifice. And you watch as some man makes his way through the queue. He arrives at the front of the line and he hands over a sickly sheep to the priest. The poor thing is hardly conscious. It's clearly taking its final gasping breaths already. Its short life is almost over. And the priest looks at the man and says, this is your offering? Well, yeah. What else am I supposed to do with it? It's sick. I don't know what it's got, but you don't expect me to feed this to my family, do you? Well, I guess not. Give it here. I mean, it's just gonna end up as ashes on the altar of burnt offering anyway. So who's next? And the next family steps up. And they hand over a blind lamb. Here's our offering. But it's blind. Well, yeah, but this is our offering. We can't just keep this little guy and have him reproducing and giving us more blind sheep. We've gotta get rid of him somehow. The priest says, I don't know, the law of Moses says we're not supposed to offer the sick or the blind animals. And addressing the crowd, he's like, well, is this what everybody has? And the replies come back, well, no, mine's not sick, mine's not blind, mine's lame. Well, I brought a sheep that I found this morning that was half torn apart by a predator of some kind, but it's still alive, I think. That's okay, right? Well, does anybody, does anybody have a healthy spotless sacrifice? And finally, there's a guy who goes, well, I do. Mine's perfect. I stole them from behind my neighbor's house this morning. Now that might seem like a ridiculous scenario, but it is not far off. In this text that is aimed directly at the priests in the temple, the Lord accuses them of willingly accepting and offering, according to verse eight, the blind, the lame, the sick. In verse 13, it adds the stolen to the lame and sick, or as the King James Version has, instead of stolen, it says that which is torn. The idea of that word is it means to rip or to tear away. So either some person had stolen an animal, ripped and torn it away from its owner, or some predator had come and caught it and had been tearing away at its flesh. People were bringing known stolen animals or collecting half-dead remains of some lamb that was torn by a lion or a wolf, the equivalent of offering ancient roadkill as worship. And the people were bringing these so-called sacrifices to the priests, and the priest went ahead and took them and offered those sacrifices basically in the name of convenience. You can understand how the logic would have worked. Well, they were gonna die anyway. You were gonna lose them anyway. It's just gonna end up as a pile of ash back there at the burnt offering, so what difference does it make? God gets what he wants, you give up what you didn't, you were gonna lose anyway. This ends up being a win-win situation. Except, of course, this is not what the Lord wants. He accuses the priests of despising his name in this practice. In Malachi's standard example of asking probing questions and making direct statements, the Lord says the priests have tarnished his glory before the people. And the people bringing these sacrifices are offering unacceptable, worthless worship. In verse six, you priests who despise my name. In verse nine, will he regard your person? In verse 10, I have no pleasure in you, neither will I accept an offering at your hand. In verse 13, should I accept this from your hands? The main idea of our text here, Malachi 1, verses 6 through 14, is that worthless worship is offensive to a worthy God. Worthless worship is offensive to a worthy God. The priests and the people are wrong for this. Now the priests primarily are the focus of the text because they, of all people, should have known better. You can glance over at chapter two, verse seven for a second. It says, for the lips of the priests should keep knowledge. and the people should seek the law from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts." So the reality is any of the people in Israel should have known that not bringing a blind or lamb or sick or stolen or torn apart, half dead, mangled mutton is a sacrifice to the Lord of that is not acceptable. But the final stop sign should have been when they got to the front of the line and had to hand it over to the priests who should have politely, or maybe even not so politely, sent them packing. The priests of all people knew the law of Moses. Incidentally, let me just read to you what the law of Moses says about this kind of sacrifice. Leviticus 22, verses 20 through 24. Whatever has a defect you shall not offer, for it shall not be acceptable on your behalf. And whoever offers a sacrifice of a peace offering to the Lord to fulfill his vow or a free will offering from the cattle and the sheep, it must be perfect to be accepted. There shall be no defect in it. Those that are blind, or broken, or maimed, or have an ulcer, or eczema, or scabs, you shall not offer to the Lord, nor make an offering by fire of them on the altar of the Lord. Either a bull or a lamb that has a limb too long or too short, you may offer as a free will offering, but for a vow, it shall not be accepted. You shall not offer to the Lord what is bruised or crushed or torn or cut, nor shall you make any offering of them in your land. Deuteronomy 15, 21 simply says, if there is any defect in it, If it's lame or blind or has any serious defect, you shall not sacrifice it to the Lord your God. Listen, the Lord God had reasons for why he gave those commands. Let's remember that every sacrifice in the Old Testament was pointing forward to the ultimate sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, the perfect Lamb of God. And maybe that'll help us understand why the Lord takes this practice as an insult. Whether they fully understood it or not, bringing some sacrificial offering as an act of worship to the Lord was a statement of faith in God's promises, faith that would ultimately be fulfilled in the sacrifice of Jesus, the perfect Son, the perfect Lamb of God, who is spotless and holy and sinless and flawless. He is without blemish. It is his blood. that is sacrificed, that atones for our sins. Whether they understood that or not, or let's just be straight about this, whether they liked it or not, the Lord God had the perfect right to demand worthy worship through meaningful sacrifices. Worthless worship is offensive to a worthy God. So let's start with where the text starts. Why worship at all? Should hardly be a question that needs to be asked of the people of Israel or of Christians today, but Malachi doesn't hesitate to build the groundwork of his argument. Why worship at all? You worship God because God is worthy of worship. Look at verse six. A son honors his father. A servant his master. If then I am the father, where is my honor? 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? Worship is grounded in the person and work of God. Worship is what we do because we recognize both who God is and what God has done. Verse six actually contains three titles for the Lord God that deserve a little consideration. God deserves worship as father, God deserves worship as master, God deserves worship as Lord of hosts. First off, he deserves worship as father. In Malachi's rhetorical style, he makes statements and asks questions, right? Sons honor fathers, but God says, if I am the father, where is my honor? When we think about God assuming this title of father, because he is God the father, We might not assume in that title all the things that would have been understood in biblical times. Primarily, I think we assume the title of father is all about the role of God in loving his people and assuming responsibility for them. And for certain, God is father in that sense. He loves us, he cares for us, he watches over us, he corrects us, he guides us, he provides for us. His love as father is so immense that Paul says in Ephesians 3.15, it is from him that the whole family of heaven and earth is named because he is the father of this massive family. Yet here, Malachi is not approaching the fatherhood of God from that perspective. Not in verse six anyway. When we think of the fatherhood of God in the sense of His love and His protection and His guidance for us, we're only seeing half the picture. That is focusing on what we receive from Him, but the fatherhood of God is also about what is due to Him. Think of this, the primary command for children in the scripture from as far back as the Ten Commandments, honor your father and your mother. God says here, if I am the father, where is my honor? There is no failing in what he has provided for us, but the text is addressing the failing in what we are to give to him. Okay, I debated using this illustration because it's very personally, and frankly, I might just lose it and not get through it. So I apologize if that's the case. When I was a teenager, a sarcastic, rebellious, know-it-all jerk of a teenager, right? When my father and I found ourselves at odds with each other, which I know you can hardly believe would ever happen, He began resorting to a conversation ending phrase, and I hated every time I heard him start to say it. He would say, you don't have to love me, but you have to respect me. I don't say this as an anger or complaint about my father. I don't think he could possibly understand that every time he said, you don't have to love me, but you have to respect me, he ended up losing a little of both. This was my fault, more my fault, I'm sure, than his. It became a bitter and in many ways broken relationship as I just resorted to giving him exactly what he asked for. Duty bound obedience but there was rarely any affection going either direction. This is not what fatherhood should be. It's not what fatherhood should be for our own personal lives. The ideal goal of fatherhood should see us draw out from our children loving affection and reverential respect. Malachi 1 proves this clearly. I said a moment ago that love is about what we expect from God as Father and respect and honor is what is due to God as Father. And both of them are here. Do you remember how this began last week up in verse two? The very first words of God, I have loved you. And because God has loved us, we ought to love Him in return. He is worthy as Father of our honor and reverence. Sadly, I cannot go back in time now and change the relationship I had with my father to try to rebuild the bond of love and respect as it should have been. I can, as a father, try to nurture both love and respect with my children, but most importantly, based on the text, we all can, as children of our heavenly Father, render to him the respect and love that is due to him. He says in this chapter, I have loved you. I am the Father. Where is my honor? Their acts of worthless worship were an offense to God who deserves to be worshiped as Father. God deserves to be worshiped as master. Again, in verse six, a son honors his father, a servant his master. If I then am the father, where is my honor? If I am a master, where is my reverence? Again, this is about what is due to God. He is master. This is a word that's often translated other places as simply the word Lord. Lord is master. Jesus said no man can serve two masters. By assuming this title of master, He is asserting himself as the absolute authority. God is in charge. It is not the servant's place to direct the master and tell him what it is that's going to be suitable to please him. It is the servant's job to simply do what the master says will please him. God has made all creation. He rules as master over all creation. God deserves worship from all creation. And until you recognize and submit to that central truth that God is master and Lord over your entire existence, all your effort to worship will be worthless. There is this ever-growing movement in Christianity today which aims to use the Lord God as a means to get what you want from Him. The Bible says He is Lord and Master of your life and you serve Him, not the other way around. In fact, to have any true saving relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ requires you to submit to him as master and Lord. Joel 2.23, Acts 2.21, and Romans 10.13 all say with unified voice, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. You have to respect him as master to see Him as Savior. God deserves worship as Father. God deserves worship as Master. God deserves worship as Lord of hosts. The term Lord of hosts literally means Yahweh, God's name, Yahweh of armies, the God of armies. The army of heavenly angels march on his orders. The armies of earth move according to his will to conquer and they will stop and surrender at his command. God is the Lord of hosts. He is Yahweh of armies and he deserves our worship. Just look through this text this morning and see how not so subtle Malachi is trying to just sneak that title in once or twice or actually eight different times. Verse six, if I am master, my reverence, says the Lord of hosts. Verse eight, would he be pleased with you? Would he accept you favorably, says the Lord of hosts. Verse nine, will he accept you favorably, says the Lord of hosts. Verse 10, I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts. Verse 11, my name shall be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts. Verse 13, you also say, oh, what weariness, and you sneer at it, says the Lord of hosts. Thus, you bring an offering. Should I accept this from your hand? Says the Lord of hosts. Verse 14, for I am a great king, says the Lord of hosts. God deserves worship. for who He is and what He has done. Listen, the God that you came into this building to worship this morning, He is God the Father who loves His children perfectly. He lovingly adopted us into an eternal family and He is due our love in return and our glory and our honor and our respect and our worship. That God is master, he made heaven and earth. He spoke all this world into creation, into existence. He's moved all things at his will. And today all those who are with faith in Jesus are servants of God. And your master rightly demands your obedience and your reverential respect and your worship. He is the Lord of hosts, the armies of heaven march at his command. The armies of earth move at his will. He can put down every rebellion. He can defeat every enemy. He can bring victory to you over every obstacle. He deserves our awe, our honor, and our worship. The text just teaches God is worthy of worship. Not only is he worthy of worship, it's also clear in this text that worship requires sacrifice. Worship is an act of giving, not an act of receiving. Worship goes from us to God. That's the only direction it goes. When you come to worship, You come to this place, look, there are things that I hope you get out of it. I hope that you leave feeling some emotion from the text. I hope that you leave having learned something. I hope that you leave having received some comfort from the Lord. But you had better have come in order to give, because that's what worship is. You can go through this text. When the Lord God offers this biting critique of their worthless worship, you will not find anywhere that it contains a single word describing his disappointment in their unwillingness to show up and get blessed. That's not what it's about. In fact, if you imagine the scene at the temple and the people standing in line with their sad little sickly sheep and limp lambs, they had at least brought with them an offering. They had understood that. Worship was not about them coming and getting in line, empty handed, waiting for a handout. Worship is about giving, not getting. in all the approved acts of worship in Scripture. Worship is about recognizing the glory and honor and service due to the Lord. That's what this text is about too, right? I have loved you. I am the Father. I am the Master. I'm the Lord of hosts. Where's my honor? Where's my reverence? Why aren't you giving what is due? The people were failing in worship because Their attitude was to give as little as possible and presume that God would be satisfied with it. Now note, this is not about tithes and offerings. We'll say very little about money. Now later on in Malachi, he's gonna bring it up and we'll deal with it there, but that's not what this text is about. So we're not gonna make it about tithes and offerings this morning, because that's not what's on Malachi's mind, but I want you to see what is on Malachi's mind, which is the heart of worship. So let me just say it as simply as possible. Worship without sacrifice is not worship. Worship without sacrifice is not worship. The people were coming to give. They were showing up in the name of worship, but they were only giving what was easy to give. They were willing to give what it was that they didn't want anyway. I mean, who wants a blind goat? Who wants some sickly sheep? Right, I'll steal my neighbor's lamb and sacrifice it because it doesn't cost me anything. But the Lord God commanded a perfect, spotless, costly offering for a reason. One, because it pictures the worthy, perfect offering of Jesus Christ. And second, because God knows our hearts. God knows us enough to know that we will do the bare minimum. And so he set the bar a little higher because worship without sacrifice is not worship. In 2 Samuel chapter 24, that book ends with King David understanding that he needed to offer worship to the Lord, right where he was. And he was nearby, there was a valuable piece of land. It was a threshing floor owned by a man named Araunah. And David told Araunah, I want to buy the threshing floor from you to build an altar to the Lord there. And Araunah's response was fantastic. Just take it. You're the king, I'm glad to give it to you. You can have the land. Here's some oxen I was using to work the land. You can have the oxen in order to sacrifice. I don't have much wood for a burnt offering, but you can burn my farm tools. You can take the yoke off the oxen and use that to start the fire. That was willing sacrifice, but the lesson there is not really from Araunah, it's from David's response to hearing that offer. Here's what David said in 2 Samuel 24, 24. The king said to Araunah, no! but I will surely buy it from you for a price. Nor, listen, nor will I offer burnt offerings to my God, to the Lord my God, with that which costs me nothing. Why? Because worship without sacrifice is not worship. It is hypocrisy to give a gift to the Lord that was worthless to you and you expect somehow he's gonna look at it and treasure it. Now does this mean that next Sunday we're gonna form our own queue and y'all are gonna bring in some spotless perfect lambs and we're gonna have a bloodletting ceremony up here and then we're gonna go out back and we're gonna have a bonfire where we incinerate all the carcasses. No, don't come for that. The Lord Jesus Christ is the perfect spotless sacrifice. He's already been offered. We don't need to bring some animal to atone for our sin because Jesus has already taken the sins of every believer and bore them to the cross. He shed his blood there as the atoning sacrifice, dying in our place. rose again, proving he had the acceptance of God the Father. He is, in the words of John the Baptist, we talked about this morning, he is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. So through faith in Him, submitting to Him as Lord and Master, you are called to serve and to worship God as a child in the Father's family who has been redeemed from your sin. None of that changes, though, the principle in Scripture that worship without sacrifice is not worship. What sacrifices can you bring in worship to the Lord? Well, let me give you five things really quickly from outside the text before we move on. First, you can bring a sacrificial gift that costs you something but promotes the gospel. This can be a financial cost. When the Apostle Paul received a financial gift from the church at Philippi, he wrote to them and described it as if they had worshipped God through a burnt offering, when all they had done was sent money. He says in Philippians 4.18, indeed, I have all and abound, I am full, having received from Epaphroditus the thing sent from you, which was a sweet-smelling aroma, an acceptable sacrifice, well-pleasing to the Lord. Second, you can offer the sacrifice of praise to his name. Every time you outwardly express that God is worthy to be glorified, it is a sacrifice of your pride. Because you're not worthy to be glorified. Hebrews 13 verse 15 says, let us therefore continually offer the sacrifice of praise to God. That is the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His name. Third, you can offer the sacrifice of good works. Do some things which are costly to you for the benefit of others. The very next verse in Hebrews says, do not forget to do good and to share for with such sacrifices God is well pleased. Fourth, you can offer a sacrifice of declaring the gospel of Jesus to others. The idea of evangelizing the world is gonna be part of our text in a moment, so I'm not gonna dwell on it a lot here, but in Romans 15, 16, Paul describes his work of preaching the gospel as an acceptable sacrifice to God, and 2 Corinthians 2, he describes it as God receives it as a sweet-smelling savor like he would of the Old Testament sacrifices. Fifth, you can and you must offer your entire life in service to God. Romans 12 verse one. I beseech you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. All of those are acts of worship where you make a sacrifice and worship without sacrifice is not worship. Worship requires a sacrifice on your part. Moving along, worship glorifies God in your heart. When you think of this text, the heart of the problem is in fact a heart problem. God makes it evident when he asks those rhetorical questions, where's my honor, where's my reverence? Isn't this evil? By attempting to satisfy. The people did not honor Him, they did not respect Him, they did not revere Him, they did not glorify Him, they did not find their joy in Him. If anything, they felt the whole worship thing was tiresome and boring. The fact is that they felt like when they came to worship God and bring sacrifices, well, this is just something that we have to do. And it led them into going through the motions which God didn't recognize as worship at all. Look at verse 13 of the text. God tells them, you also say, oh, what a weariness, and you sneer at it, says the Lord of hosts. And you bring the stolen, the lame, and the sick, thus you bring an offering. Should I accept this from your hand? The idea here is what a weariness, what a burden. No, it's time to worship again. The idea here of you sneer at it is a little hard to translate. It comes from the word that means in Hebrew to blow or to breathe. So the King James Version has you have snuffed at it. Other translations say you disdainfully sniff at it, you snort at it, you turn up your nose at it. Maybe the best way to explain it is to try to give you an example. Worship again already? This is the attitude of the heart of worship that is offensive to the Lord. That heart of worship that lacks the desire to worship the Lord who sees it as something wearisome, that's what is offensive. Understand, it's not the lack of an offering that is the biggest offense here. That lousy, road-killed, mangled mutton sacrifices were wrong. But those were just a symptom. And I mean, you know this, right? Even though the Lord through this text uses the symbolic language of bringing an offering to his table and he calls it food, you know, in verse eight, would you serve your sick and dying little lamb chop to the governor and think he's gonna be happy with you? Even though he speaks symbolically this way, we understand God was not eating these sacrifices, right? You know that, right? He's not in heaven keeping a ledger saying, well, if we don't get 20 more healthy spotless lambs today, we're not gonna meet our quota, so these people better get with it. This is hard for us to grasp sometimes because when we finally admit that worship without sacrifice is not worship, then we start to make the sacrifice and we go to the other bad end of thinking where we start thinking, oh, well, I'm bringing a really good sacrifice. My worship is really great for God and I'm doing this because God needs me to do it. Y'all, he does not. Do not misinterpret this text into convincing you that God needs anything that you've got. There's nothing that you could ever give to God that he didn't give to you to begin with. Psalm 50 verses nine through 14 address this, and I'm gonna read it to you from the ESV because it really does capture the sort of sarcastic quality of the text. Psalm 50 verses nine through 14. I will not accept a bull from your house or goats from your fields, for every beast of the forest is mine. The cattle on a thousand hills, I know all the birds of the hills. All that moves in the field is mine. If I was hungry, I would not tell you, for the world and its fullness are mine. Do I eat the flesh of bulls and drink the blood of goats? Offer to God the sacrifice of thanksgiving and perform your vows to the Most High. In other words, these acts of worship where we make a sacrifice, it is not because God needs something from us. Whatever God needs, He already owns. The complaint here is not because God's running short on prime, spotless lambs. He is running short on patience with people who do not have a heart of worship beyond what is, I'll just do what's convenient. Is this something we need to worry about today? Are we prone to get bored in worship to think, oh, it's that time again? to only find ourself worshiping the Lord when it is convenient, when we don't have anything else to do. And we make excuses like, well, this sports season is really short, it's only so long, I'll get back into church as soon as these games and practices are over. Well, God doesn't expect me to give up this family time, does he? Like, that would be a sacrifice. And what would the family think? By the way, yeah, what would they think? We'll see that in a minute when it talks about our commitment to worshiping the Lord. I can't get up that early on Sunday unless I don't stay out with friends on Saturday. That is not a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Or, I'm here. I was here for roll call. I've checked off the box that says I've performed my religious duty, but don't expect me to participate. I don't sing good enough to sing. I don't read well enough to read. I don't pray impressive enough to pray. To try to worship God like that would be a sacrifice of my pride, and I'm gonna keep my pride. The list could go on. You know that it could. Every one of us knows just how it is a sacrifice to worship God at times. Worship without sacrifice is not worship. To worship only when it is convenient in the way that is convenient, when it doesn't cost you anything, is worthless worship. God is Father, He is Master, He is Lord of hosts. Is He worthy of the sacrifice He's asking of you or not? It may seem harsh to get to that point in the sermon to put it to you like that, but according to this text, that is what God expects of religious leaders he's addressing. Look at verse 10. Remember, he's speaking to the priests who should know better. Verse 10, who is there even among you who would shut the doors so that you would not kindle fire on my altar in vain? I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord of hosts, nor will I accept an offering from your hand. The Lord is there asking, is there any priest in the temple, just one, who's willing to call out this mess? So if you're picturing that worship line at the temple, some priest would finally step up and step out and say, that's it, we're done. We're not doing this anymore. Break up the line. We're dousing the fire at the altar. We're locking the doors behind you. Come back tomorrow and mean it. And if the religious leaders don't have enough courage to call out and correct this, God says, I have no pleasure in you. Because no amount of good intentions on the part of religious leaders can sanctify the worthless worship of the people. This is actually far from the only time that the Lord said, just stop it. Right, in Isaiah chapter one, where the people are going through all the right motions without their hearts engaged, God says, this is not right, I won't have it. Worthless worship is an offense to a worthy God. All right, one final thing, quickly, I want to see that will benefit us. It explains why God takes worship so seriously. Partially, it's because, as we just said, the worship of God glorifies God in your heart, and that is important to him, but worshiping God glorifies God in the eyes of others around you. There is a repeated refrain in this text that should not be missed. Look at verse 11. My name shall be great among the Gentiles. In every place, incense shall be offered to my name, and a pure offering, for my name shall be great among the nations, says the Lord of hosts. Cursed be the deceiver who has in his flock a male and takes a vow, but sacrifices to the Lord what is blemished, for I am a great king, says the Lord of hosts, and my name is to be feared among the nations. See how many times there is that, this makes a difference to how God has seen other places. It makes a difference to how God has seen to those around you. We sometimes hear or use the common excuse, well, I guess if I'm wrong, I'm not hurting anybody but myself. Put that out of your mind. The prophet Malachi stresses worship matters because worship glorifies God in the eyes of others around you. Worship is not just about the relationship you have with God. It is about that, but it is not only about that. Malachi is telling God's people that the seriousness with which they worship God is a declaration of God's worthiness to be worshiped in the eyes of the world around them. Everywhere. In verse 11, from the rising of the sun until, even until it's going down. That's not saying from morning until night. That's describing as far as you can go in the east and still see the sun rise, and as far as you can go in the west and still see the sun set. In other words, everywhere, my name is to be great. God insists on worthy worship because it glorifies his name among the people. The authentic and sacrificial worship of God will lead to offerings and worship from others in other nations. In verse 14, God will not accept deceitful adoration full of worthless worship because I am the great king. and the nations will not learn to fear or reverence or honor the Lord unless the Lord's people fear and reverence and honor him. Your worship matters for you, it worships for those outside of you. So examine your own heart and your own life and your own worship and be honest enough to recognize that it is sending a message to others. you're either telling people this sport is more important than the Lord or the Lord is more important than this sport. We asked earlier, what would the family think? Well understand, you do your family no favors by silently telling them this morning you are more important to me than worshiping the Lord is. Your friends hear the message loud and clear when you are unwilling to sacrifice your time It tells them that you don't think God's really all that worthy of your time. And even within church, the assembly of the Lord Jesus, we're sending a message to others. The New Testament tells us in Colossians 3.16 that in our worship we teach and admonish one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs. The seriousness with which you take worship makes a statement about the glory of God in your heart, and it makes a statement about the glory of God in the eyes of those around you. And so the text teaches to worship him in spirit and in truth because he is the father who loves you and he deserves your love and your respect in return. He is the master who owns you. He has the right to expect your obedience and honor. He is the Lord of hosts. He's the God of armies in whom all power and authority resides and to whom all praise, reverence, and glory belongs. He is the perfect sacrifice. He is the only really, truly costly sacrifice whose blood cleanses us from sins and gives us eternal life in Jesus. He is worthy of whatever inconvenience we might endure for the sake of bringing glory and honor to Him, magnifying Him in our hearts and glorifying Him in the eyes of the world around us. Our worship has to recognize God as worthy of all honor, all reverence, all sacrifice, or else we are offering unacceptable, worthless worship. And worthless worship is offensive to a worthy God.