It is a real joy for me to be back here in the Bethel Church, here in Wheaton. I hope and pray that the Lord has given you a good and refreshing summer. Our scripture this evening is from the Old Testament prophecy of Malachi, the last of the so-called writing prophets, Malachi chapter 1. Amalekiah almost certainly wrote this prophecy in the fifth century before Christ. The temple has been rebuilt. The priests serve as kind of the governing of the people. There is no Davidic king because the people of God are still under Persian control. But their spirituality had begun to slip, and that's why this book is a wake-up call. Malachi 1, verses 1 through 5. The oracle of the word of the Lord to Israel by Malachi. I have loved you, says the Lord. But you say, how have you loved us? Is not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. I have laid waste his hill country and left his heritage to the jackals of the desert. If Edom says, we are shattered, but we will rebuild the ruins, the Lord of hosts says, they may build, but I will tear down and they will be called the wicked country and the people with whom the Lord is angry forever. Your own eyes shall see this and you shall say, great is the Lord beyond the border of Israel. This truly is the word of the Lord. I direct your attention to verse 2 and the first part of verse 3 as our text tonight. I have loved you, says the Lord, but you say, how have you loved us? Is not Esau Jacob's brother, declares the Lord? Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated. Dear congregation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Israel in the time of Malachi is in a post-exilic slump. Yes, the temple has been rebuilt and the priests serve as kind of the organizers of the community, the ones who govern the people of God at this time. And yet the nation is still in a slump. Read chapter three, for example, where the Lord tells the church community that they experience drought and insect pests because the people are robbing God. In tithes and offerings and contributions, they are robbing God. For the exile to Babylon, though it had been a very profound mental spiritual shock, It was not the kind of shock that left a permanent change in the community of faith. There were many sins in the lives of our spiritual fathers and mothers at this time. Now, the Oracle of Malachi is a tract for our times. Because if you read through the book, and it's not a long prophecy, he will address in chapter one, worship, and the ho-hum attitude that the people of God have about worship. Chapter two, he addresses the bad leadership of the priests. He talks about marriages that are with ungodly people, and then divorce of those who are godly. In chapter three, he talks about robbing God, that the tithes and offerings that God requires were not coming in. He mentions the injustice that is carried out against widows and orphans and the hired worker. Now, if you think of those topics, any one of those topics, a pastor today or a speaker today could wax eloquent. That's why I say this book is a track for our times. There were many sins in the lives of God's people. And so Malachi has a lot on his plate, so to speak, in what he must say to God's people. Verse one calls this an oracle, but another translation that is possible for the word oracle would be burden, the burden of the word of the Lord to Israel through Malachi, for what he is going to deliver is a heavy matter, weighty, serious, very weighty. And yet notice in our verses this afternoon that everything that God is going to address in the rest of the book, he puts it specifically into the context of his love for his people. That's why I think the theme for Malachi 1, verse 2 and 3a would be, the Lord says it all in love. And we're going to notice that this love, first of all, is a love that chooses And secondly, it is a love that persists, it endures. Now this is a rather unique beginning for a prophetic book. If you were to go through the Old Testament and read the Old Testament prophets, you'll notice that they all have their own way of beginning their message. Isaiah begins with a lawsuit. Hosea begins by describing the very unusual marriage that he has with a woman of adultery. Joel starts with a description of a locust plague. Amos describes the fire of God falling down upon a variety of cities and nations that surround Israel until finally that fire of the Lord comes and addresses Judah and then Israel. Ezekiel, oh, that's a beautiful one. He has visions of God. He sees the great cherubim. and the wheels within wheels and the many eyes. But this prophecy begins with a very unique and simple statement from the Lord. I have loved you. It sounds so strange, especially when the prophet is just about to engage in this barrage of hit them hard because of their sins, worship, leadership, marriage, robbery. The book has a most striking beginning, and it's God who starts off the discussion. He comes to a people who are in this post-exile slump, and he simply says, I have loved you. And immediately, the response of God's people is this retort, well, when? When did you ever love us? How have you loved us? In this time of divine discipline, people may have imagined that God had abandoned them, that he did not love them. But when did God ever abandon his people, completely forsake them and leave them? And the Lord refers in this context to two brothers. If we go back to Genesis 25, there's the story. had been barren for a period of time, but eventually she becomes pregnant with children. But there are twins in her womb. But she notices that the twins are struggling with each other. And she seeks clarification from the Lord. And the Lord says, well, there are two nations within your womb. Two nations. That is to say, these two boys will become the ancestors of two different peoples. But here's the unique thing. The older will serve the younger. The older will serve the younger. Now, this is 1,400 years, more or less, before the time of Malachi. 1,400 years before Malachi. And God declares to Rebekah that he had already chosen Jacob and favored Jacob. He loved Jacob. But Esau, he passes by in hatred. And so by adopting Jacob, God, like a father, takes care of him, nurtures him, raises him up. A people develop from Jacob. God committed himself to Jacob. He committed himself to his people. He committed himself to the church. He commits to you. To you. But the other brother, the older brother, Esau, also became a nation. The Edomites are the descendants of Esau. But God did not commit himself to Esau at all. No. He passed him by. He hated him. Esau, the Edomites, also had struggles and conquest in their own history. And the Edomites may, throughout that period of time of distress that they faced, they tried to rebuild. Rebuild their nation. National rebuilding. Yes, we can. Yes, we can, was their chant. And maybe there were Edomite leaders who said, let's make Edom great again. An early mega movement. Let's make Edom great again. But God says, you know, you can build all you want. But every time you rebuild your nation, I will tear you down. I will tear you down. And let's check out history. Where are the Edomites today? They're gone. They've vanished. They have melted into the pages of history, and there is no identifiable Edomite people. But the church of Jesus Christ is still there. The church is still surviving. God has committed himself to his people, Jacob. The church still lives. And notice, He discriminated between two peoples, even before they were born. And that gives us more insight on what his love is all about. He speaks with love. All that he says is said in the context of love. And his love is his choice, not based upon the merits of the one that he loves. And from this, we begin to learn the following about his choice and about his love. First of all, it is sovereign. God as the great king, Yahweh as the great lord and master of the whole universe, has made a sovereign decision to love Jacob, no matter what. Secondly, his choice for Jacob, for his people, for you, is unconditional. Now let me explain that. When I say unconditional, what I mean is that it is not that Jacob has to first meet some preconditions, You know, do this and do this and do this, and then I will elect you. No. No. Before they were born, before they'd done anything good or evil, God chose for Jacob. There were no preconditions that he had to make. His love, his choice is unconditional. No preconditions to fulfill. Now Calvin, John Calvin, in commenting on this passage, writes that God says this, I have loved you, in order to bring out the ingratitude of the Jews. Now, God says it, says Calvin, in order to make their ingratitude plain. Now this is true, but it's true only in part. It's not the whole story. God always means what he says. He always means what he says. He's not trying to trick us with clever statements. Brothers and sisters, it would be tempting for us to sit here this evening, to sit back and listen to the reaction of the Jews. How have you loved us? As they react to God's statement, I have loved you. And think this, we would never say that. Well, perhaps we might not say it, but think it? Think it in moments of great trouble, difficulty, and pain? Oh, yes, we would. Oh, yes, we have. When difficulties of any sort arise in our life, health concerns, financial difficulties, personal struggle, family issues, The subtle thought, that flicker of doubt, enters into our own soul. And the suggestion arises that, well, maybe God doesn't really love his people. Maybe he really doesn't love me. And when you read this book, you will learn that the Jews after the exile had rebuilt the temple. And they had resumed worship services. I mean, after all, they're not pagans. They're not pagans. They had restored some kind of religious community again. But God had sent drought and insect pests to discipline them because of their drift from wholehearted worship and service of the Lord. Even today, people can go through the motions of the Christian faith. But in fact, the wind has gone out of their sails. They attend worship services. They sing and they give. They do devotions, maybe, but their devotional life leaves them cool, lukewarm perhaps. They attend services, but then wonder, I'm doing the right things. I attend worship. I give to this church. But then they wonder why God doesn't arrange blessing after blessing after blessing in their lives. And then when something troubling arises or disturbing enters the picture, then they wonder about his love. I know a young man, not from this area, grew up in Canada. He grew up in the Reformed faith. from the very beginning of his life. And he said, you know, whenever I sit in church, I just feel guilty. Now he's part of a very large congregation. And I said to him, well, have you talked with your pastor about this? He said, the pastor doesn't know me. He doesn't know me. I just feel guilty. People sit in church feeling guilty, and then when they hear the gospel, the good news about the love of God, deep down in their soul, they're asking, well, when did you ever love us? When did you ever love me? I know. I'm not working hard enough. I'll just put more effort and work harder and harder, and then I will win God's love to me. Listen. Listen, I have loved you, says the Lord. Malachi relays that word of the Lord to a people who have gone into this slump. And this God chose us to love his people in Christ, even before the foundation of the earth was ever laid. Ephesians 1, verses 4 and 10 and 11. But that's also the witness of the Old Testament as well. Not because of your efforts, not because of your works, and not because of your merits. Listen to what God says in Deuteronomy 7, 6-8. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of the peoples. But it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery from the hand of Pharaoh, king of Egypt. Then later on in the book of Deuteronomy, when we get to Deuteronomy 30, God in his word, in his Torah, says, now you Israelites are going to mess up badly. He prophesies the exile. And I will send you out of the land. And this will serve as a wake-up call. Well, it did serve as a wake-up call, but it was one of those wake-up calls that faded. You know, we sometimes hear about soldiers who utter the foxhole prayer. Under great fear of dying, they swear that, you know, Lord, bring me through this, and then I will do this and this and this for you. And for some people, that happens. But then for some others, over time, they start to forget it. Israel had gone through the trauma of the exile, and now, decades after they came back to the Promised Land, this worship. They sniff at it. They snort at it. Malachi 1. It was a wake-up call, but it did not last. And so a millennium later, a millennium after, The book of Deuteronomy is given to Israel. A thousand years about, God says it again, I have loved you. I have chosen to love you. Now this love is, in the second place, a love that persists. It is a love that endures. I once heard of a pastor somewhere in the Midwest, I'm not exactly sure, or even which church tradition he was a part of, who went to serve a congregation, and then after six weeks, he left. He left. Now his colleagues in the ministry asked him, you know, brother so-and-so, I mean, six weeks? Why did you leave? He says, well, you can't do anything with these people. In six weeks, maybe you know their names, maybe, but you don't know their stories. You don't know their joys and their sorrows. In six weeks, pastor, you haven't ministered to the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. You have not. How have you really loved them in a mere six weeks? Let me ask you, congregation, do you have a God who conducts a pastorate that is so short-lived? Think of it. How long has God been taking care of Jacob, Israel? pretty long time. When Jacob was in and his descendants, his sons, were in Egypt, they grew to become a very large people. Then he brought them out with his strong hand and his outstretched arm and then went with them through the wilderness, listening to their whining and ingratitude and their complaining, but he stayed with them. He brought them into the promised land and conquered cities that they had not built, gave them homes that they had not constructed so that they might benefit from the fields and the orchards and the olive groves and the vineyards that they had not planted. He's been with them a very long time. He says to Israel, I chose you, I elected, selected you, not because you were the greatest, most numerous people, I chose you because I loved you. That sermon was given to the church about a millennium, about 1,000 years before Malachi, and the sermon text is the same. 1,000 years after Deuteronomy, I have loved you, says the Lord. that love persists, it endures. Now, I always become a little bit nervous, maybe a tad anxious, when I preach on a text that deals with God's love. You know, when you talk about God, you're talking about theology. And theology has its own grammar, so to speak, within the Bible, for you're representing who God is. And in the Bible, love is both a verb and a noun. That's not unique to love, but it is a verb. It is a noun. God is love, says the Apostle John. There's the noun. I have loved you, says the Lord in Malachi 1. There's the verb. And when you talk about God, you represent two people, the Creator and the Redeemer, and you better be very accurate. Oh yes, you better get the noun and the verb about God and His love right or you misrepresent God. This is why people need good theology. They really do. Churches and homes and schools and seminaries better teach about God in a way that is right. And to talk about love, even in the church, that runs its own risks because the word love has been hijacked by our culture, by popular culture and what Paul McCartney called silly little love songs. And after all, didn't Tina Turner a number of years ago, I'm dating myself, of course, Tina Turner once gave us her definition of love. What's love got to do with it? What's love but a secondhand emotion? Yeah, right. A secondhand emotion? That doesn't represent the nature of God at all. That's not what's going on here in Malachi 1 through 4. No. God says to Israel, a people in this post-exilic slump, I have loved you and I still do. That's the sense of the original wording. I have loved you and I still do. Not an emotion. No. Here it is. It's a divine choice, an electing choice, a commitment to stay with his program and with his people. For richer, for poorer, for better or for worse, with no end in sight to his commitment to his people. Now, we may very well be concerned about cheap grace. Pastor Vander Hart, you know, are you one of those preachers who just preaches, you know, love, love, love, grace, grace, grace? Well, if someone has that concern, and that may very well be a concern, What are we really concerned about? After all, the love of God, genuine love, is not lawlessness. It's not indulgence. It's not just letting everything go, not at all. It has been said that discipline is the highest form of love. Perhaps so. God's discipline is not always pleasant, but it is an expression of his love. For God has put this church under his curse, chapter 3, verse 9. You're under a curse, the whole nation of you. But, and this is critical, this is critical, he does not change. Malachi 3, 6, that's why you sons of Jacob are not consumed by his holy fire. I don't change, says the Lord. No, no, no, not after six weeks of difficult pastoring, not after 600 years, not ever. But how? How in the world can this immense creator, all-powerful, all-knowing, everywhere-present being whom we name God, how can he love a sinful people? Because that's what we are, that's what Israel was, that's what we are. How could God love you and me when we're rebels and enemies and dead in sins and trespasses? No, you are not worthy, deserving, but he does love you before time began, while time exists, and then into the future, everlasting life. How can God say it with love? Here is where John 3, 16, for example, comes to mind. God loved the world in this way. Thus, he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in Jesus will not perish, but have everlasting life. For God did not send his son into this world to condemn it. We already stood under condemnation. He sent His Son to save this world, that by His death on the cross, He would take our sins and guilt to Himself. By His glorious resurrection, He would conquer the grave for us, bringing righteousness and vindication to His people. He ascends to the right hand of God, and there He intercedes for you. He pours out His Spirit, that by that Spirit, the Spirit may take the things of Christ and then perform that spiritual surgery in our hearts, taking out hearts of cold stone and replacing them with hearts that are alive. This is what he does. This is how he shows his love for us, and that changes everything. My life your life, my work, your work, are profoundly and thoroughly impacted by God's love that comes to people who may go through the ringer. They may go through the ringer, people who are still so ungrateful, grumbling and whining, and still say, I have loved you, and I still do. One writer put it this way, the knowledge that one has been chosen by God for an intimate relationship and that God will always act in accordance with that relationship should have a profound difference in the way we handle obstacles, failures, disappointment, strife, and human antagonism. Our God, your God, will stop at nothing until he brings to completion the work that he has started in you on the day of Christ Jesus. We all know that the Apostle Paul addresses himself to the matter of love in 1 Corinthians 13. Now, I know, to be sure, in the context, Paul is talking about how love should characterize the members of the Corinthian church. Because in chapter 12, he talks about how the various parts of the body, which the church is, need to work together and not claim all the glory for themselves. In chapter 14, he talks about how the spiritual gifts should be worked out in the worship of the church. But then right between 12 and 14 is chapter 13. Now, brothers and sisters, I'm not going to wax eloquent here to say Chapter 13 is not a short essay on romance. It isn't. Why would the Apostle Paul insert a small little essay on romance between 12 and 14? No, no, no, no. He's talking about something more sturdy than romance, even though romance is a wonderful thing. And Paul reminds Christians how they should act within the church, but God never acts in a way that he doesn't call us to live in such a way that he is not himself being or doing. Consider this. If God had only thundered his law at Mount Sinai and had no love, that would only be cruel and frightening. If God had all power and all wisdom but had not love, it would profit you and me nothing. God is patient. God is kind. Jesus is patient. Jesus is kind. He does not envy, but He is complete in Himself. He doesn't need anything else to complete Him. He doesn't boast. God does not boast. He tells us of the great things he has done so that we may boast in the Lord, but he himself, he does not boast. God is not proud. God is not rude. He is not self-seeking since he's perfectly complete in himself. He doesn't need any creature whatsoever. He's not easily angered, but he is slow to anger. We know that verse, don't we? Slow to anger and long suffering and patient with us. He keeps no record of his children's wrongdoings because this is what he did. He takes your wrongdoings, your sins, iniquities, transgressions, he takes them and then he nails them to the cross in his son. They're dealt with. They're dealt with. already at Good Friday, so that now God is not angry at you. He's not angry anymore. God does not delight in any evil. He banishes it from His presence. He rejoices in the truth. His truth, the truth that sets us free, as that truth especially comes to expression in our lives. God always protects his own. Jesus always protects his own. He's always trustworthy. He always hopes and plants that hope in us. God always perseveres. God never, ever fails. When I feel completely ashamed of myself, And when all seems to be lost, God will always, always there be in His love for you, for me, because of Jesus. Whatever the Lord says to His people, He puts it all in His love. He says it all in His love. He's chosen you in love apart from anything that you have done, and His love persists He sticks to it to the very end, all because of Jesus Christ and his work for you. You need to know that. You need to hear that. People in churches need to hear it. I have loved you and I still do are the words of a living and holy God who is committed to taking you and me from where we are to where we should be in his grace. No more complaining, no more whining. Thank you, Jesus, for always loving us. This is good news. Amen. Let us pray. Lord, when we think of how life works, we put in a week of labor and we are rewarded with a paycheck. We think that's how life works. We do the efforts, we get the benefits. And so for us to accept and to believe a gift that is so amazing and deep and wide as your love, you discipline us, we've experienced that, we know what that is, but to experience that discipline as an expression of your love. this is too much for us to grasp. And so, gracious God, we pray that as we go into this week that we will come to understand even more and appreciate even more the amazing love that you have for us, and that you will revitalize the message of the Church to this world that is filled with anger and war and bitterness and corruption, the love of money and the love of self, that rather our only, our only recourse is to give up all, to trust you, to glorify you, to enjoy you forever. Gracious God, therefore, write that word, that gospel word of your love, upon the tablets of our heart. May that motivate us throughout the rest of our life, we ask for Jesus' sake. Amen.