Sacrilege

See, I will send my messenger who will prepare the way before me. Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant whom you desire will come, says the Lord Almighty.

But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner's fire or a launderer's soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver.

Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in his righteousness. And the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord as in days gone by, as in former years. So I will come near to you for judgment.

I will be quick to testify against sorcerers, adulterers and perjurers, against those who defraud laborers of their wages, who oppress the widows and the fatherless and deprive aliens of justice. But do not fear me, says the Lord Almighty. I, the Lord, do not change.

So you, O descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed. Ever since the time of your forefathers you have turned away from my decrees and have not kept them. Return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord Almighty.

But you ask, how are we to return? Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me. But you ask, how do we rob you? In tithes and offering. You are under a curse, the whole nation of you, because you are robbing me.

Bring the whole tithe into the storehouses, that there may be food in my house. Test me in this, says the Lord Almighty, and see if I will not throw open the floodgates of heaven and pour out so much blessing that you will not have room enough for it. I will prevent pests from devouring your crops and the vines in your fields will not cast their fruit.

Says the Lord Almighty. Then all the nations will call you blessed, for yours will be the delightful land, says the Lord Almighty. You have said harsh things against me, says the Lord.

Yet you ask, what have we said against you? You have said it is futile to serve God. What did we gain by carrying out his requirements and going about like mourners before the Lord Almighty? But now we call the arrogant blessed. Certainly the evildoers prosper, and even those who challenge God escape.

Then those who feared the Lord talked with each other, and the Lord listened and heard. A scroll of remembrance was written in the presence concerning those who feared the Lord and honoured his name. They will be mine, says the Lord Almighty.

In the day when I make up my treasured possession, I will spare them, just as in compassion a man spares his son who serves him. And you will again see the distinction between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not. Now, when Track One were away on holiday this year, we learnt a number of new hymns and choruses, and one of them that we've got up on the screen now, the King is among us, his spirit is here, let's draw near and worship, let songs fill the air.

And we're going to sing through the six verses of this hymn. I'm sure if you don't know it, you'll soon pick up the tune, and once we've sung it through once, we'll sing it all through together, and we will stand to sing the second time. He is among us, his spirit is here, let's draw near and worship, let songs fill the air.

He looks down upon us, delight in his face, enjoying his children's birth, enthralled by our praise. For each child is special, accepted and loved, all of it from Jesus to his Father above. And now he is giving his gifts to us all, for no one is worthless, and each one is called.

The Spirit's anointing on all flesh comes down, and we shall be channels for works like his own. We come now believing your promise of power, for we are your people, and this is your hour. The King is among us, his spirit is here, let's draw near and worship, let songs fill the air.

And just before I lead into the address this evening, I'd like to not only add my welcome also to visitors, local visitors, but we've got some special guests from across the seas, gathering together in Fittleworth, a little village in Sussex, for a conference. They're members of the Open Air Campaigners, and you may know of Open Air Campaigners from its ministry in Brighton. Occasionally we've had visits here, and we're most indebted to the Lord for the stimulus to evangelism by our English brothers.

Well, we've got Tom Swan with us this evening from Ontario, Canada. He's the international director of OAC there. We've also got Art Williams, who you may have guessed from the Christian name Art.

He's the USA director, glad to have him with us. Bob Van Maren, who is the Dutch director, and two other friends. Where are you? Would you just indicate? Let's just give them a welcome.

And I would like to say that we do recognize that the Battle Hymn of the Republic is really the tune of John Brown's body, and we were singing that hymn to that great American song, although we knocked up the words a little differently, but we hope that made the Americans feel at home at any rate. Well, I want to speak to you somewhat briefly this evening on the subject of sacrilege. Sacrilege, or otherwise robbery.

All theft is bad. If you steal, that's wrong. If you commit larceny, embezzlement, any one of the varieties of ways in which you can take goods that don't belong to you and as a result leave someone else impoverished, that is very wrong indeed.

But the most wicked form of theft is the theft against God. And that's got a special word. Sacrilege.

Presumably sacred gives us the word sacred, and the idea is going somewhere and taking from deity what belongs to it, whatever the deity may be. If you go out to India, you'll discover that things in temples don't really have to be safeguarded. Nobody would think in terms of pinching one of the idols from a Hindu temple.

If you did, well, you might run up against the problem of the priest bringing a curse down on you, and in any case it just would not occur to the average Hindu to steal. But I want to suggest to you that in sophisticated worthing, or not sophisticated worthing, there are those, and possibly some in our congregation this evening, who are guilty of the sin of sacrilege. Malachi 3 verse 8 puts a question up, Will a man rob God? And the answer supplied is, But you do rob me.

We live in a day when theft is on the increase. Sainsburys hike their prices by about, I'm guessing the percentage, 2 or 3% to cover those who go there and filch, pinch, steal, in other words, the goods. They don't pay.

And so they have to take a levy from the prices, increasing the price to cover the theft. Now, what about thieving from God? The Bible says, Will a man rob God? And the possibility is this, that God himself is sinned against. The one who is sinned against in our text is none other than God.

And the first thing I want to say about that is that it is unnatural to sin against God. It's unnatural to rob God. Think about your mum for a moment.

You youngsters, glad to have you with us this evening. Would you really go to your mum's handbag and take money from her purse? Well, maybe half a percent of young people might be tempted in that area. But for the vast majority, 99.5%, the thought wouldn't occur.

It's unnatural. You might thieve against someone else. You might open someone else's wallet.

But it's an unnatural thing to pinch from your mum. And if you think it through, it's an unnatural thing to steal from God. Let me suggest something else.

Not only is it unnatural, but also it's ungrateful and it's unthinking. Ungrateful on this reason or for this reason because God has done so much for you. Why won't you steal from your parents? Well, I wouldn't be here without my parents, would I? They gave me a home, they gave me shelter.

My mum risked her life in having me. So it would be the height of ingratitude to in any way steal from her. It would not only be unnatural, it would be ungrateful.

But you see, God gave you life and your mum and your dad were used in the process of you coming to this earth. So isn't it equally unnatural and ungrateful to rob God, to take things from him? And the last point that I want to suggest to you in this area, which I'm trying to keep simple because I want everyone to understand. So really shake your heads and get your brains working.

It's a most unthinking thing to do. Now we're not talking about fooling worthy police. You could probably get away with that, if you're clever.

I've got to add that because we have policemen who come here and I don't want to be in trouble. But there is such a thing as unresolved crime, is there not? Quite a high proportion actually. You see, with all their expertise, the CID, they have their limitations.

But the idea of getting away in pulling a fast one on God is ridiculous. You can't move fast enough to pull it. You can't go off into a secret corner and do something wrong that you know God objects to and believe that he doesn't see it.

Because the Bible tells us that God's eyes roam around the world. In other words, he can see what's happening and in no sense is he prevented by the thickness of the wall or the shadiness of the spot to which you've gone. So here's the question, will a man rob God? And my answer is that to do so is unnatural, it's ungrateful and it's unthinking.

But people try it. Nonetheless, people try it. So let's move on to something else.

Let's talk about the actual sin of robbing God because thus far you may have not made too much sense of what I've been trying to say. How could I, little insignificant me, rob God? All right, I'll tell you. There's many ways in which you can rob God.

Let me suggest to you that one main way is this, crediting good fortune to the wrong source. Crediting good fortune to the wrong source. The Bible says every good and every perfect gift comes from the Lord.

So somebody sends you a five pound note. And what do you say? Well, thank my lucky stars. It's a good day.

Or I've got out of bed the right side. All is going well. Crediting to your good fortune what really ought to be credited to the Lord.

Crediting it to the wrong source. Come across those people who say that they're self-made. Here is a great tycoon and he's a lot of money.

And you say to him, well, what's the secret of your success? Oh, he says, I'm self-made. Now that's the daftest comment that anyone ever did make. You're not self-made.

You can't make yourself. I mean, you didn't suddenly wake up one day because, well, you constructed yourself. There were other humans involved and a divine plan, a divine purpose involved.

So to strut around and believe that somehow or other your good fortune is as a result of your human ingenuity and initiative is not really a satisfactory explanation. Not when you think it through properly. There's a man in the Bible whose name was Nebuchadnezzar.

And he was one of the greatest kings that ever lived. And he looked after the empire which was controlling the world in his day. The empire was the Babylonian.

And he was king of Babylon. He was emperor of Babylon. And on one occasion he looks at his city and he says, look at this great city which my hands have made.

As though he was utterly responsible for the fame of Babylon and its empire. And the Bible tells us in the book of Daniel that within a matter of weeks his sanity had been taken from him. And he was behaving like an oxen in the field, eating grass, far away from civilization, his hair having grown like an eagle's and his fingernails like the claws of a bird.

You rob God of his honor when you credit good fortune to the wrong source. I'll show you another way in which you rob God. You rob the Lord by blasphemy.

You know what blasphemy is? Take the name of Jesus wrongly. Use the name of the Lord in vain. That's one of the Ten Commandments and it's censured.

You shall not take God's name in vain. Don't you hear it so many times? BBC, ITV, at school, in books as you read the books. So often the name of God is brought down and insulted and that is robbing God of respect.

You wouldn't say anything about my mother in my presence and get away with it. I'll tell you, I'll be strongly against you and set you right. Why? Because that detracts from my family name.

And there are those who name the name of Jesus and they do it in a blasphemous fashion. And generally it's the word Christ that is used or good God or good Lord. Not in a praising way but in a flippant fashion and that robs God of honor and respect.

And many of us if not all of us at some time have been guilty of that, robbing God in blasphemy. What about robbing God by stealing your youth? You know there's a sort of person who says well I'll go to church when I get to old age, when I get to 50, I'll come regularly but now I really want to live. But the Bible says remember your Creator in the days of your youth.

You know what a fag end is? A very unpleasant way of describing the stub of a cigarette. And somebody has bluntly said why give God the fag ends of your life? Why wait until you're 50, 60, 70 to give the Lord your life that He might use it in His service? Robbing God, you can rob Him of those youthful years and say I'll have nothing to do with God now. I'll wait until I'm much older.

What about robbing God as the prophet Malachi here was really dealing with in the area of finance? Retaining all your finance. Will a man rob God? Yet you rob me, you ask. How do we rob you? In tithes and offerings.

You know the Jews were a very disciplined people in terms of religion and what they used to give to the Lord. They would give 10%. In fact they wouldn't donate it as a gift.

They would look upon it as something that really belonged to the Lord. It was His due. In fact, if you went to the synagogue, that's a New Testament equivalent for a church or an Old Testament equivalent for a church.

If you've been born in Palestine then you would bring one-tenth of all that you earned or if you hadn't got money you'd bring one-tenth of your produce assuming you've got lands and you're a farmer or so on and so forth and you would give it to the Lord. But it wouldn't really be a gift. It would be what God required of you.

It would be His due. A tax that you would pay. And when you don't give God what is His due then in the Old Testament times particularly they were impoverished as a result.

Now, what about us Christians? How do we handle our monies? With less care than the Old Testament people? Could you live on 10 times or 9 times what you put in the offering throughout today? Test yourself. Because that's the only way to get into proportion what you've given to the Lord. There are many of us you see who will unblushingly sing our songs of consecration in terms of our Lord taking our finance and our intellect and our mind.

But really we've got a hesitation. We sing what we don't mean and as a result we make a mockery of the hymn. Take my silver and my gold not to might would I withhold but Lord this week's been so hard Please accept the Barclay card.

Defer what you pay to the Lord not only in terms of finance but in terms of time. And so you start to steal from the Lord. Stealing from the blessings that He has entrusted you with to use in His service.

What about then taking God's time? The Bible tells us that six days shall you labour and do all your work but the seventh day set apart for the Lord. One of the commandments says to keep the Sabbath day holy. Now when you move from the Old Testament into the New Testament you discover that the Christians didn't keep the Sabbath day.

They started to keep the first day of the week. It was the day on which the Lord had been raised from the dead. I don't believe that they imported into that day some specific pharisaical do's and don'ts.

It was the best day of the week in which they rejoiced in the goodness of the Lord. Now do you keep Sundays a special day? Every day is special for a Christian. In one sense every day is a Sabbath.

But particularly on a Sunday it's convenient to come to the church. Whichever local fellowship it may be. Come around the Lord's table.

Come around His word. Do you do that regularly? If you don't you're robbing God. And that's a sin called sacrilege you remember.

So many ways I could go on and illustrate this more but I don't want to. Apart from one other thing. The Bible says, My son give me your heart.

Now that's what the Bible is asking of you. That's what God is asking of you. Your heart, your life.

Say it Lord Jesus. I want to give you everything I have. Because you are my Savior.

Lord God I want to offer all that I am in your service. And if you fail to do that you're guilty of the sin of sacrilege. You're robbing the Lord.

Because that's a directive to everyone. My son, my children. You who depend on me.

Without my sovereign grace directed towards you. You would have no life at all. Now I'm asking you.

Give me your heart. And many of us have to confess that we've never given our hearts to the Lord. We're not really His disciples.

We're guilty of sacrilege. We've stolen from the Lord. Stolen time.

Stolen respect. Stolen finance. Stolen so much.

Well, let's then come to a more positive aspect of my little address this evening. If it's true that you're guilty in the ways that I perhaps itemized here by means of this visual aid. What restitution is possible? How can you pay back? That's what restitution means.

Doesn't it? If I've stolen and I'm exposed and I feel terribly sorry and I have the ability to repay that which I have taken, then I do so. That's restitution. That is paying back.

But many of the things here I can't pay back, can I? If I blasphemed, I can't say, Well Lord, I didn't mean it. My words are out. And words are never lost.

Did you know that? Whatever you speak still exists somewhere in the universe. If you had a sensitive enough receiver you could pick up the sound because you cannot annihilate sound waves. Isn't that a terrible thing? You imagine someone with a massive computer.

No, imagine God. Alright, with a computer. Bringing back all the things that you have ever said and playing them to the people that you said them about.

Only having them present at the same time. Do you know, that's a nightmare. It frightens me even suggesting it.

I just apologize to everyone here that I may have ever said anything wrong about this moment just to get some sort of human absolution. But you see, you can't really put it right, can you? You can't get the words and stuff them back in your mouth. More difficult than trying to get toothpaste back in the tube when you've taken out too much in the morning.

And so for many of us we're in a mess because blasphemy, we can't recall it. Many of us can't recall our youth and give those early years back to the Lord because we're middle aged or old age. So we've taken time and there isn't any possibility of us bearing restitution, paying back.

So what must we do? Well, we must listen to the language of the New Testament. You see, Jesus, when he came on earth, he gave what he never owed. Never did anything wrong and yet he died.

Why did he die? Well, because he loved us. He hadn't broken the law, not the Roman law, nor the Jewish law, nor anybody else's law. But he died.

So he has credit to his account his death, which wasn't necessary. And it was an infinite death. That means it has tremendous power, tremendous potential because he wasn't just an ordinary man.

He's a God man and he dies so that we've got the credit of someone who is God who has died and he's never done anything wrong. Now Jesus says that that credit on his side can be transferred to your side to pay, to restore, to balance up what you have done that is wrong. That's the message of the Bible.

In other words, you have robbed God and you can't pay back but here is someone who has not robbed God and he's got so much grace in the sight of God that he can take it and apply it to our account. Let me illustrate or try. Let's take one of our elders.

I'll not name them because I hate to embarrass these good and humble men. And here am I and I'm in debt and I can't pay it. A thousand pounds in debt and one of these men they've got a thousand pounds credit and they're concerned.

My embarrassment might be up in front of the magistrate's court. Think of the scandal in Worthing. Pastor in debt.

Can't pay. So they come along and they say, you know, you're really not such a bad chap. You take this.

So I gladly take it and my account is cleared. Now that's not an exact illustration. I'm feeling quite tired at the moment.

I can't get a better one than that but at least the principle is sound because this is what the Lord Jesus has done for us. Not because we were good chaps. We were far from that.

Anything but. But because he was a good man and he loved us. And he said, here's the bonus.

Here's the grace. Here's the credit that I have with almighty God. And you have robbed but I'll put it to rights.

And so on the cross of Calvary the last words which our Lord Jesus Christ said or almost were, Father forgive them. They know not what they do. I've paid the debt on their behalf.

When Jesus died who were his companions? Do you remember? Well Isaiah the prophet said that Jesus was killed amongst the transgressors. That means people have broken the law. Putting it perhaps more simply Jesus had on either side of him when he died two men who were robbers.

Robbers. They'd robbed their fellows and they'd robbed God. And they were in process of dying.

You can argue against it. Nobody could say well they didn't deserve to die. They did.

They deserved to die. Two counts. They'd robbed their fellows and they'd robbed God.

But one of them comes to the Lord Jesus or turns his head and angles his words towards the Lord Jesus and said Lord Jesus when you come into your kingdom remember me. When you go to your father's house reserve a room for me. Lord if there's anything that you can do on my behalf will you do it right now? And Jesus said relax.

I've done it immediately. The benefit of my death is transferred to your account. A moment ago you were a robber in the sight of men and God.

Now you're not a robber in God's sight because I've given the value of my death to you. Now what Jesus did for that man he can do for everyone here. Whether you're eleven whether you're sixty younger or older I don't care.

You're guilty of sacrilege. You've robbed God in some areas. One or two of the items that I've illustrated they certainly fit you.

And there is no way that you can pay the debt. No way at all. I can't make it more clear than saying that nor more emphatic.

And I can't help you. The first time in years I've never baptized people in the tavern in a baptismal service because I've had a cold and have felt quite unwell today. But even if I was down there as a so-called ordained minister I couldn't have helped you.

There's nothing holy in my hands. There's nothing holy in that water. We're in corporation tap water.

No sacred benefits whatsoever clean or was. What we can't do for you my friend Jesus can do. If you'll take what he offers confess the sin of sacrilege and say Lord Jesus Christ I come to you.

Forgive me. Introduce me to your Father. Place your spirit within my life.

And make me a child of God. No longer a robber but one who's been forgiven. Let's pray.

And I'd like you to pray in your mind if not out loud. No, let's pray out loud. Christian folk it's never wrong for you to rededicate yourself to the Lord.

Maybe a loud prayer from a spoken prayer from Christian friends will encourage others who've never made a commitment to Jesus to join in too. Let me tell you what I'm going to outline because I don't want you to pray in parrot fashion. I'm going to pray a prayer of commitment.

If you want to commit your life to the Lord Jesus right now because of what I've said or what you've heard from the baptismal candidates what's come into your understanding through witnessing this baptism then follow me and the rest of committed Christians as we pray a prayer. Heavenly Father we come to you in the name of the Lord Jesus. We recognize that there are many times we have robbed you.

Many times when we have done things that we are now ashamed of. We appreciate that we cannot help ourselves but we believe that Jesus died for us. Credit the value of his death to our account.

Accept our sorrow for the sins that we have committed and make us to be your children forgiven from our sins for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. If you prayed that prayer with meaning for the first time I want you to take a book from me I'll be at the door on my left.

Ted Davey will be at the door on the right and he too will have some of these books and we'd like just to hand it to you we'll talk to you if you like but if you don't want to talk to us just take one of the books but use that as an indication of an assent that you've made to the message that you've heard throughout the whole of this service this evening. Now we're going to change our last hymn and we're going to sing about the cross what number did I say that was Ray? 266 in the supplement 266 when peace like a river attendeth my way when sorrows like sea billows roll it is well, it is well with my soul. Let's really enter into the singing of this hymn.

When peace like a river attendeth my way when sorrows like sea billows roll it is well, it is well with my soul. Praise to the Lord, Lord and Father and Father for that blessed possibility of it being well with our soul we thank you and for many of us, including our brother the possibilities become an actuality and we cannot but praise you for all your many, many goodnesses to us now send us on our way rejoicing basking in the blessings of God Father, Son and Holy Spirit now and always Amen.