It is great seeing all of you. My name is Michael, and if I haven't met you yet, hopefully I'll have a chance to do I'll be in the cafe for a few minutes afterwards, so just say hi if I haven't met you yet. I am the lead pastor here at Christ the King Church. I have two housekeeping things that I want to address before we get into the sermon for today.

The first one is where's Eric? Eric Tuff and Sam? No, put your hand up. Go ahead and stand up. Go ahead and put both hands in the air. Okay, that's Eric.

Eric has served our church faithfully as an elder for the past six years, which is two terms according to our bylaws. Two three-year terms. And he has done so without pay. So, he's worth every penny that we haven't been paying him. But Eric has done a wonderful job, and our bylaws require, after serving two, a maximum of two terms, that they have to step down from eldership, and then they would be eligible for renomination a year later.

So, Eric his term finishes up one week from today. So, if you have any personal crisis this is the week to get it in. And Eric will field all of those calls. We really want to make him remember why he is getting this this break from a ministry. No, I'm kidding. Eric is one of my best friends. I trust him.

I, he is a man that I have the utmost respect for and I'm, I will miss. serving with him as an elder. But I am very glad to continue just knowing him as a friend and as a brother. And that's that really is the ask also of our church. And this is weird. It's a little awkward to do, and it's mostly awkward for Eric.

But it will be awkward for all of us in that we want to know him and interact with him as a church member and as a brother in Christ and as a friend. But there is some line where that becomes elder work. And we don't, can't exactly draw that line and nail it down precisely, but as best we can, we want to shield Eric from having to be the elder that we know him to be.

And that means there's a little bit of discipline on our part, some discipline on his part, and finding that, that, that line to where we're not burdening him as an elder when he is not going to be an elder. Now you're later from now if the Lord wills God, he will be eligible for a renomination and reelection as an elder, but at least until then starting next Sunday Eric will no longer be an elder.

So, in the Lord's timing, we do trust that God will raise up more elders in his timing. So that's the first housekeeping announcement. Second housekeeping announcement. We've all noticed that it is cramped in here and This introduces competing priorities. We have one priority, which is we want to make space for people to come for the church to grow, to be hospitable for people to come in and hear the gospel preached and all of those things.

That's one priority. The other priority is that we don't want to divide our church into two services, which we've done before. And sometimes that's a necessary thing and it's not. necessarily wrong or sinful, but we certainly don't like it. It's not our preference. So, we've come up with a plan and I can give you a sketch of it here and we'll give you details in the next couple of weeks to account for this.

So, the plan is this we have an overflow room downstairs. We call it the great room. But on Sunday mornings, it's overflow. We have a TV down there that has this service with our cameras and sound and all That's going on. We're going to set that up with rows of chairs like it is up here and then we're going to ask city groups on a rotation to meet downstairs on an assigned week Maybe once a month ish.

We'll figure out the exact numbers. So that's something that if you're in a city group now Don't let this be your incentive to not join a city group So we still want you to join a city group, which means you might have to worship downstairs once a month But that is that's a plan that we'll try it out for maybe a couple of months and see how it goes And if we all hate it, then we'll change it, right?

But this is a plan that I think will buy us a little more time as the church continues to grow And you've all heard this and I’ll mention this a little bit later in my sermon, too Like we are looking for another place to relocate to and we are we're making some progress But we're not really Not ready to share like, Oh, here's a plan, but we do have things that you can, that are promising and we'd hope that you would continue praying for that.

So please be praying for that too. And hopefully we'll have some more concrete information to share soon. Okay, now to the sermon. I should restart my timer cause I got a timer going up here. It's I don't want that to count against my time, but I won't do that. What we're talking about today is sabotaging your faith.

Not that you should, but that it does happen, right? We do this. People do this. We do things that bring us down spiritually. It's like there's subtle sins that we can do. They're easy to ignore, but there is an accumulated effect over time that is, self-destructive to our walk with God. And so, it's not uncommon for people over time to slowly disengage from the Lord.

They eventually lose heart, and they eventually sometimes give up trying to walk with the Lord altogether. Sometimes people will just lose interest. And a lot of you are at a season of life where this is, the biggest temptation or just life is crazy busy. Of course, everybody would say they're busy but if you got little kids and you're, you, there, there is a season of life where things are just unusually hectic.

And a lot of you were in that stage. So, life gets busy. Some families we don't really have that happening here, but some families have like kids and travel sports. And that really takes a toll on their spiritual life because they travel on weekends. And life gets demanding, work gets demanding. And so faithful church attendance can become twice a month church attendance.

And twice a month church attendance can become once a month church attendance. And then once a month church attendance becomes a CEO Christian. You know what that is? Christmas and Easter only, Christian. That means you come to church twice a year. That does happen. There's a lot of people that, that may do that.

Then maybe you don't pray as much, and you don't think about God as much as you once did. You don't feel as spiritual as you did before. Incidentally, I've noticed this happens with people that were involved in a college ministry that was very life giving, very refreshing for them. And then they see that as a spiritual high, the pinnacle of spirituality.

And then they get into normal life with normal responsibilities and they're always pining after the college days when they had great community, and they were hanging out with Christians all the time and they were praying and studying the Bible together. Of course, you were living basically in a commune.

And you all have this little city that you were living in together and you just find your friends all the time. That's wonderful, but that's not a healthy expectation, but that does happen. And as you go through life, you start to find yourself really feeling disconnected spiritually.

Responsibilities pile up and then there may be conflicts at church that can pile up. There may be even some complaints about church that pile up. And so, you pull back a little. You determine it's just it's too much work to put in the effort of forgiveness, repentance, reconciliation. That's just, that's hard.

These things really take a toll. And then you might find yourself enjoying lazy Sunday mornings. Sleep in a little bit, get your coffee going, watch some TV, make pancakes, get ready for NFL. This. Maybe this happens and this does happen for people and then maybe sometimes people can go through a pretty intense trial That really tests their faith and their faith hasn't been built up, so they've been ignoring God for a while, but now they find themselves in this trial praying again but then they think you know that they determine that the prayers aren't working I'm praying, but it's not working.

It's not, I don't sense God really coming through. And then they may start to notice I've got non-Christian friends. They seem to be doing just fine. In fact, my non-Christian friends seem like they are even doing better than my Christian friends. Of course, naturally they don't notice that their non-Christian friends don't have the added burden of going against the flow of culture.

And that does weigh Christians down and that's an extra weight to carry. And maybe that's why some of their non-Christian friends seem to be doing better. It's because they're not trying to fight sin and walk with Jesus and really overcome a temptation, but slowly over the course of a year, two years, three years, COVID years that sort of stretch into eternity.

These things just stretch over time until they just give up. And so, we know the famous stories of apostasy, people that just they went crazy liberal, this hard left turn. And we know those stories of people abandoning the faith. But the thing is you don't have to become a blue haired, progressive drag queen, communist to renounce Christianity.

You can just drift. You can just lazily let culture pull you along and not. Not really engage you disengage. All you got to do is start envying unbelievers. You start thinking Christianity isn't working for me You start grumbling about God and then over time the world does its thing and people sabotage their faith like this all the time That's what was happening in Malachi's day obviously the details are different But the situation in Malachi's day is exactly the sort of conditions that I described to you I want to share with you three ways that people sabotage their faith, and then we'll talk about what to do about it, and how to prevent this from happening.

All right? Let's dig in. Malachi chapter 3, verses 13 through 15.

Three verses.

God is speaking. Your words have been hard against me. Says the Lord. But you say, how have we spoken against you? You have said, it is vain to serve God. What is the profit of keeping his charge or of walking as in mourning before the Lord of hosts? And now we call the arrogant blessed. Evildoers not only prosper, but they put God to the test, and they escape.

This is God's Word. First way that you can sabotage your faith. Envying the wicked. Envying the wicked. I'm taking these points in reverse order. So, 15 verse 15, verse 14, verse 13. So here in verse 15, he says, now we call the arrogant blessed. So, we have arrogant people and they're calling them blessed.

Arrogant people have it better off. Evildoers not only prosper, but they put God to the test, and they escape. So basically, arrogant people are blessed. Evildoers prosper. They can test God. They can disobey God without consequence. In other words, they think God treats them better than he treats us. And I wish we were like them.

I wish I had it as good as these evildoers have it. I wish we have it as good as these arrogant people have it. The Bible calls that envy. The Ten Commandments calls it coveting. I have one commentary that says envy is grief or anger caused by another person's success. That's a great definition. Envy is grief or anger that is caused by another person's success.

Like I said, this is forbidden in the 10 commandments. Here's the 10th commandment. You shall not covet. So, covet is a reference to desire. Covet is I want what somebody else has. That's coveting. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's.

God has given you what you have, and what God has given you is a gift, it's a blessing. God has not given you what other people have, and so it is a sin of coveting. It is one of the Ten Commandments. It is a sin to covet what somebody else has that God did not give to you. And the thing is, envy doesn't make anybody's life better.

Nobody's life is improved by coveting. Envy can only make life worse. And in fact, envy is destroying our whole society. You might think, how can that be? I'll tell you. Some people would say greed drives our society. You heard this? This is greedy people. Greed is destroying our society. Or greed is driving our society.

No. It's not greed, it's envy that is driving our society. Greed is more of an animal instinct. Greed is just a lust for things. I lust, I want more things. Give me. Greed is just, I want to acquire. Envy only exists in comparison to other people. So, envy is like somebody else has it, and because they have it, I want it.

If you just want something, that's greed. But if you want something because somebody else has it, and they're being blessed, they're benefiting in some way, that is envy. And that is what we see happening in our society. Envy is social. It is relational. And so, in the United States, how do we think of who's rich and who's poor?

There's not necessarily a dollar amount, is there? Sure, there's like the poverty standards, but nobody thinks of rich and poor in those terms. We think of rich and poor in terms of what do I have, what does everybody else have, and how do I measure up. And so, people that have less than me, they're more likely to be poor.

And people that have more than me, they're more likely to be rich. But we think of these things in comparison to other people, not in absolute terms. So, we, a lot of times, we just think we're middle class. That's convenient, right? We're just poor enough that we can justify envying rich people, and we're just rich enough to avoid the stigma of poverty.

And so, if we're middle class, then we're neither envious, we at least, we don't have to, we don't have to acknowledge envy, but we still have some of our comforts, and we don't have the stigma of being poor. And so that's the way we operate a lot of times. The incentives of our society are primed for discontentment, that produces envy in us.

Envy is like this inner discontentment with who you are, with what you have, and other people that have the things that you wish that you had. And that discontentment within yourself drives you to envy that. And the fact that somebody else has it is what triggers it in you. So, envy, it's an unquenchable thirst.

It's never going to be satisfied because that there's no amount of getting the thing that you want that will satisfy that desire. Because there's always going to be somebody else that has something that you don't have that's different from you and that has an advantage over you. And so, there's always going to be something like that in somebody else.

So just getting the thing that somebody else has won't fix the problem. Which is also why envious people are always miserable. It's just they're not happy. They're not happy people. Because envy ultimately is a heart problem. It's something that is within. It is not a material problem. Envy is a heart problem.

So, envy is never about the thing. Being envied the thing or person being envied is merely a trigger for the discontent that is already latent within you. Now, what I'm describing so far is just garden variety envy, like you see in the 10 Commandments, what Moses was talking about in the 10th, but is within the context of the covenant community of Israel and being your neighbor, meaning another fellow person in the people of Israel, right?

What Malachi is talking about may very well, would include that, but it seems like it extends beyond it. Because he's talking about the arrogant. Now maybe that's the believing arrogant, but it may also be unbelieving arrogant. So, it's the wicked people out there somewhere. Because they say the nations, like God is mistreating us as a people, and God is blessing those people out there somewhere.

And the Bible speaks of this in many places. Just do a search sometime, like envy and wicked. You search those two words, and you'll see, five or six different hits in your Bible search. But in Malachi chapter three, God's people were envying those, it seems, that were outside the covenant. So, they're envying people who are not within the community of God.

And so, they are under God's wrath, right? And so that is uniquely self-destructive. Because it indicates a discontentment with some aspect of your status as a child of God. So, it's not man they have a nicer car than me. It's the fact that they're blessed is a function of the fact that they don't know God.

God treats them better because they're arrogant. That's the attitude. And you might think it's absurd to think that way, which it is, but we still think that way. Why do evil people prosper? Why do bad things happen to good people? And we think we're the good people and the bad thing.

Why does that happen? And why do good things happen to bad people? We can think this way. And so, we can think that because we're a child of God, God is somehow harder or meaner to us than he is to other people. And so, the envy in Malachi 3 is occasioned by a wicked man's prosperity. But the discontentment itself is directed squarely at God.

God, you are running the world wrong. You're blessing them, and you're hurting us. So, it's if you have a kid, a Christian kid, if you grew up in a Christian home, if you have a good Christian kid growing up in a good Christian home, you have a mother and father that love them. And so, there's structure, there's rules, there's discipline, there's order.

The parents are mindful of what the kid's influences are. There's going to be restrictions on what the kid can do and not do. The kid may get annoyed with that, but the parent does it because the parent loves the child. So, the parent provides these things, but the experience from the kid, what's he thinking about?

All the other kids watch rated r movies all the time. All the other kids stay up all night long eating junk food. All the other kids get all these other things; therefore, you're running this house wrong. These other kids have it better than me, what's wrong with you? It's an accusation against the parents.

And Christians, we can do the same thing. We have restrictions. We have things that we are obligated to conform to a particular order that God has prescribed because this is the way He runs the world, this is the way He created the world. And we can rebel against it. And whenever we rebel against it and it doesn't go the way we want, we get mad at God.

And we say, God, all these other people seem to be having a grand old time. All these other people seem to be doing great. Why is it that we're stuck over here having this, these restrictions and these rules and these things that we can't do? So, underneath envy like this is this festering discontent with God.

And we don't appreciate that what God does for us is a function of his love for us. And given all the blessings that God has lavished upon us in Christ, it is exceedingly stupid. to envy the wicked. And there's really nothing to envy them for. What we know is usually just a small slice of their life.

We don't see the whole picture. We just see one little thing about somebody else that seems to be better than us. And that's what we compare ourselves to, but we don't know the whole picture. That's the first one. We envy the wicked. Here's the second way you sabotage your faith. Oh, let me read to you this one text.

I forgot this. This is just one text. There's many, but here's the text. Proverbs 23, 17. Let not your heart envy sinners, but continue in the fear of the Lord all the day. That's just one. There's many that say similar things. Second way we sabotage our faith. We make Christianity pragmatic. We make Christianity pragmatic.

Alright, verse 14. Look at what they said. So, this is their accusation against God. You have said it is vain to serve God. What is the prophet of our keeping his charge or of walking as in morning before the Lord of hosts? It's vain. Serving God is vain. It's not working, right? It's not getting me what I want.

It's not accomplishing what I want it to accomplish. My faith is not working. So, there's no profit in following God. That's their complaint. Their complaint is that their faith or obedience to God wasn't producing the results they wanted, and that is a pragmatic faith that is approaching our faith purely through the lens of what outcomes can I observe in my life because of these religious observations or things that I'm doing.

And so, it's chiefly concerned with whether or not it works. So, in a pragmatic church, worship is not about, let's lift up the name of God so that our hearts can exalt his name because he is worthy of it, period. Worship is about singing and making melody because he is worthy, period. And we edify one another through singing corporately together because that is a good and God honoring thing to do, period.

No, worship, this is the entertainment part. This is the part where it's the warmup act before the inspirational talk. And then the goal is to attract new growth. And so, listen I've been in these environments where people are talking about their ministries and they're like, you play these kinds of songs, people like it, and then they show up and they respond to particular, right.

And if you have, the right mix, you got to have the right mix into the sound and all this has got to, it's got to be presented in such a way that is on par with what they might get at a concert somewhere. And if you sufficiently entertain the entertain in a religious way, but you entertain them, then you're meeting the market demand and people keep coming.

That's pragmatism. That's not worship. In fact, that's an insult to God. And I can show you scriptures where God says, I don't want that. I hate that. That's an insult. And that's pragmatic faith. And we can do this. It's the same thing with pragmatic preaching. You're catering to market demands.

It's let's take a survey of our community. What are the felt needs in our community? Let's always preach on those themes so that people will come in here, their particular needs addressed, and their particular itch scratched. And then the church will grow because growing the church is the primary goal.

I'm not against church growth, but I don't want it that way. We want church growth because God blesses faithfulness, but that's not, we're not trying to accomplish something and we're using religious observance or obedience to God to get this thing accomplished. We do the thing because God tells us to because there is some good other than just this growth metric that we can get out of it.

We do it because it's right, and because it glorifies God, and He commands us to, and there's a benefit to us spiritually. We're edified. We're pointed towards Christ. Our affection for Christ grows. That's why we do these things. So, a pragmatic Christian approaches obedience to God merely as a means of getting what they want.

So back to the last point. There's an envy. There's a thing they want. There's a desire. And there's some sinful desire. And so, they bring that sinful desire to God, and They think if I obey God, then I'll get what I want, and that's exactly what we just read. Verse four, let's look at that again.

Verse 14. You've said, it is vain to serve God. Why is it vain to serve God? What is the profit of keeping his charge or walking as in mourning before the Lord? What's the profit? Are you ridiculous? What's the profit? God has he's shown his covenant love to you. God has saved you, at least in this context.

He saved you out of the land of Egypt. He's rescued you. He has brought you together. He has given you a law. He has told you in words how he has ordered the world. He has showed you how to live. He has given you the blueprint for a just society. And he's promised in a covenant oath that he, if you keep his covenant, you will be blessed and prosperous in this land that he gave you that didn't belong to you.

What do you mean? What is the prophet? But it's no I have other things. There's other things that are not on your list that I want. And it's vain to serve God. They're doing empty religious exercises. Meaningless. Just, they're just doing stuff. And when it doesn't, when going through the motions doesn't produce the result they want, then they're like, what's the point of all this?

I came to church. I raised my hands. I even said amen a couple times. I put some money in the offering box and then God didn't answer my prayer. What's the point in praying and going through all that junk if God is not going to give me the thing that I'm praying for? That's pragmatism.

We do the things that scripture commands us to do because of their, the inherent good in those things. We lift our hands because we express worship and our delight in God physically through gesture. We sing with our voices because our hearts delight in God. And even if our hearts aren't quite there, we sing because it helps train our hearts to get there.

These are, we don't have a pragmatic faith, but we, I think, especially in our modern world, where we're so managerial and we've got this, Plug in the formula. Here's the formula. X plus Y plus Z equals outcome. Good preaching plus good worship plus good kids’ ministry equals growing church. It doesn't matter what you do in those things, as long as it feels like it's good, and it checks the boxes, and it's got a good presentation, then you should have a growing church.

And the thing is, it does work, but it works in a way that you wouldn't want it to work. Because you're growing synagogues of Satan very often. Same thing in our own spiritual lives. I get up, I read my Bible, number one. I pray, number two. And I, try to obey God in some way, do some good deed throughout the day, number three.

Therefore, God owes me something. No, that's pragmatism. Because you're not doing the things for the good in themselves, you're trying to manipulate God. You can't manipulate God. He's not gonna fall for that. So, you gotta know your own heart to know what you're doing. So that way when you do the things that God tells you to do, you are doing them in a way that honors Jesus.

James chapter 4 talks about this. And I was surprised, honestly, when I was studying this. And I looked up this text and I was like, I've never seen this before. James chapter 4 talks about prayer. And I looked at this verse thinking about pragmatic praying. And whenever I looked it up, I noticed, oh, James also talks about coveting.

In this context. So, there's a link here. Listen to this text in James chapter four. You desire and do not have. We've already identified that. That's envy. You desire and do not have, so you murder. It's I want that thing, he's got it, I don't have it. So, I want to kill that guy to get what I want.

You covet and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel. You're at odds with people because you have this desire within you that is striving after something and other people have the thing that you want, so it creates strife and tension. And then here's the prayer part. You do not have because you do not ask.

Oh, I get it. I need to pray and then God will give it to me. Okay, so now I'm praying, but you ask and do not receive. Oh, your prayer isn't working, huh? Why is that? Because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. That's fascinating, but we do this all the time. We pray for things, and we think because I prayed for it, I did a religious thing.

Therefore, since I prayed for it, God, it's obligated to give it to me. And if he doesn't give it to me, my prayers aren't working. God, why aren't you answering my prayers? And God's Hey, James chapter four, dude, you're asking wrongly. You're asking for some selfish reason. Hey God, this guy has a nicer car than me.

I'm going to pray for a car just like his car. You're asking wrongly. You just want to spend it on your own desire. You're not asking with a pure heart, with a pure motive. God didn't give you that. And if God wanted to give you that, then he would provide the means to do but just asking for some, just, you can't pray your way out of envy, expecting God to, like God's a genie in a bottle, where God is, it's like prayer just becomes, I'm going to rub the lamp, and by rubbing the lamp, I ask God for the thing, and then God's going to give me the thing.

No, that's, you're treating God like a genie in a bottle. That's an insult to God. You're asking wrongly. Of course, God is not going to answer that prayer, that kind of prayer is not going to work, because your heart is not truly aligned with God's purposes. Don't hear me wrong. God loves to answer prayers.

Amen? There have been many huge prayers that God has answered, and I know in our lives. God loves to answer prayers. Sometimes God will tell us no, not because you're asking wrongly, but just because he has his own thing that he's doing in your life. That can happen. So, it's not necessarily if your prayer is an answer that you ask with bad motives.

It's a possibility, but that's not necessarily the case. But sometimes God doesn't answer your prayer because you are asking wrongly. Sometimes God will say no to a prayer because you're asking out of your envy. You want something and you don't have it. And so, your prayer is like you're asking God, Hey God, will you enable my further envy by giving me the thing I'm envying that doesn't align with God's purposes.

Let me give you an example of this from own life. A lot of, we mentioned this earlier. We've been praying for a church building for years, literally years, but in the last year or so, we've focused on the northern Kentucky area as the number one option of what we're looking for.

So, I've been praying about this for a long time and asking the Lord, provide this for us. And the Lord has not answered yet. And I've been able to identify a few reasons why the timing wasn't right. And so, I'm thankful for that. And if the Lord would have given us a building three or four years ago, that would not have been good for us.

It wasn't the right time. And I can see that now in retrospect. So, there's a buddy of mine in Iowa. He's a, he planted a church and, we're connected through being pastors together. And he invited me to preach at a conference in Iowa earlier this year. So, I went out there and he's real excited because they just got his new building.

And it's gorgeous. It's beautiful. And I'm like, it's due to church planner, like me, they were meeting in the school, some gym for a long time, and then finally they got this gorgeous new building. It's huge. And they got parking and accessible and all the things that I want. And I was like, it's great, man.

Praise the Lord. You know what I'm saying? It was, I was happy for him, but I was like, I saw it, the Holy Spirit said, you're envying this. And the Holy Spirit showed me that, and I recognize it. I'm like, did I envy? Yes. Did I repent? Yes. Because I just saw I wanted what He had, and God was like, that what He has is not for you, and it's not about you.

It's about what the Lord is doing, and if the Lord wants to answer that prayer, He will. And if the Lord does not want to answer that prayer, He won't. Either way, it's not His fault. It's his own purpose, and my, the way I'm praying might get in the way. I might be asking wrongly, and so my prayer, and some of you that know me well know it's like my prayer has been like, Lord, don't let me get in the way.

This is not of you. Put a stop to it. Don't let us be foolish. It's like I've been trying to get out of the way because I know my heart is inclined to, to have some ulterior purpose that serves my own fleshly ends. Pastors like having big churches. They like growing churches. It shouldn't be a secret, but maybe you didn't know that.

And if that's the driving factor here, I don't want God to answer that prayer because I don't want that sin to do harm to the body of Christ. So, I need to keep that repentance and that, that temptation before the Lord, because I want the Lord to answer this prayer because I'm asking with the right reasons.

And this is a very easy thing for us to happen. What we must never do, what I must never do, and what you must never do to conclude based on God's answer or non-answer to our prayers, that it's vain to obey him. That's a horrible thing to say. And that's a horrible thing that they said in Malachi three it's a form of self-sabotage spiritually.

And you tell yourself, God didn't come through for me as though God did something wrong. It's an accusation, but the reality is maybe you just weren't on the same page with God in the first place.

We don't go to God and say, God, here's my agenda. Here's my priorities. Here's my plans. Bless it, or I'm going to blame you for not coming through. We can never do that. God is not a genie in a bottle. God is not our servant. We are His servants. We serve God's agenda. So, if you feel as though your faith isn't working out for you, there's a good chance that you're just not on the same page with God and His agenda.

And you've got your own agenda, and you're expecting Him to bless that. Check your heart with that. Alright, here's the third one. The third way you can sabotage your faith is by grumbling against God. Grumbling against God. So, you have envy, pragmatism, grumbling. Verse 13, let's go back to verse 13.

Your words have been hard against me, says the Lord. But you say, how have we spoken against you? You have said, it is vain to serve God. What is the prophet of our keeping his charge? We'll note that word in a moment.

What is the prophet of keeping his charge? So, God's people had spoken against the Lord. Their words have been hard against the Lord. But Malachi is not talking about prayer. There is a kind of prayer where you speak directly and boldly to God where you're crying out to God and you're pleading with him to intervene, and you can even express a degree of disappointment or frustration that things aren't turning out and to express that to God is one thing.

You want to do it humbly and with reverence, but there is an appropriate way to express our disappointments with God. But they're not talking to God in prayer. And we know that because they're speaking of him in verse 14 in the third person. You have said, it is vain to serve God. What is the prophet of our keeping his charge?

So, they're talking to each other about God. They're complaining about God.

And that's grumbling against the Lord. If you were to look through scripture, Grumbling can refer to grumbling against people, but most of the time the word grumbling in scripture, it's a reference to grumbling against God. Malachi doesn't use the exact word of grumbling here, but the theme is here, the theme of grumbling.

So, they were speaking about, against God to each other, and that can be damaging to the faith of the person who hears that grumbling, right? They're the person who hears what you say, and That can weigh on them because it can whatever doubt that you're expressing to them Whatever frustration or anger you're expressing to them can be a burden on them.

It can damage their faith It could cause them to bite. Maybe I should doubt God too, you know come to think of its God hasn't answered my prayer either, God hasn't really come through for me either and that grumbling can spread Point being is that grumbling is social just like envy is social.

Grumbling is social. You can't grumble You know, I guess you can grumble under your breath, but that's not really the issue here. They're grumbling to other people They're grumbling against God to one another. There's a story of this in If you read through the book of Numbers, there's quite a few examples of the God's people grumbling.

I'll just read you this one text here, but there's several stories of people grumbling against God. And it was a pretty serious sin because you think of it, it's like they're complaining, they're whining. What's the big deal? It's what's a serious sin? Because it's like an infectious disease.

It's a social disease that spreads. Numbers 14. How long shall this wicked congregation grumble against me? I have heard the grumblings of the people of Israel, which they grumble against me.

When your heart is bitter and entitled and ungrateful and discontent, what comes out of your mouth is grumbling. Grumbling is the expression of the bitterness and envy and discontent that's in your heart already. And like I said, it is a social sin by nature. And since it is a social sin, you can catch other people in your web of grumbling.

And this can have a toxic effect. It creates just a really negative stew of a culture within a group of people, a set of expectations within a group of people, of just negativity and bitterness and entitlement, complaining. It happened in Old Testament Israel. Book of Numbers gives many examples of this, but it can also happen in the church in the New Testament.

It's like an orally transmitted infectious disease, because we speak it. Now, grumbling is, men and women can grumble, but men and women don't always grumble in the same way. So, there's maybe some subtleties in how we do it differently because we, men and women grumble in different ways and for different reasons.

Oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes grumbling will begin with women because women are more social, and women are more empathetic. They're more social, so they're relational and they're more empathetic in that women feel together more often, or at least more strongly than men do. And we'll play out a hypothetical here.

Suppose there's a woman who is upset about something. Naturally, she's going to want to talk to her friends, right? She wants to share the grievance with her friends, the frustration. And naturally, women are going to want to empathize with her. Because they care for her, and women are strong in compassion.

Now, their empathy may take the form of not merely listening and understanding, but also agreeing with the complaint and then sharing in the grievance. They can, so they can over empathize where they get caught up in the grievance and they'd be like, they can grieve together, they can get frustrated together.

And so, the second woman that just heard it is now upset, not merely at the thing, but because her friend is upset. She's grieved for her friend and the first woman's discontent transferred over to her friend who is now upset with her. Another two of them. And then, it doesn't, it's not hard to imagine how this can spread a bit, where there's several people, that talk, and before long, grievance can accumulate and build up within a group of people that all share a same or similar complaint, but it was all triggered by the first one.

What happens when their husbands hear about it? Our women are upset. Your wife's upset about this? Yeah, so is mine. That's a problem. We've got to do something about that, because men want to please their wives. They want to advocate for their wives. They want to fight for them. It's I've got, I now have something to protect, I have something to get involved in.

Women will talk about it. Men want to take action. What are we going to do about this? We'll meet over at that guy's house and we're going to deal with the problem that he started. And it's men don't do this. And so, men can get triggered in their anger. They get angry. And whenever there's opposition, the anger flare is even hotter.

And so now you have men that kind of are reacting to a grievance or grumbling or frustration that women have, and men are wanting to take action. And so now they're making decisions, they're doing, they're making choices. And now there's something that is growing. It becomes a more of A hostile environment.

It grows. And this doesn't have to happen, in an instant. It can happen slowly, like a slow cooker. Over many months’ time, this can happen. But this discontent of men and their anger, it can spill out into the open. Whereas with women, it can stay more hidden and underground. And whenever it spills out into the open, more people get drug into the web.

And before you know it, you've got a crisis. You've got a potential division. You've got some major thing that needs to be addressed. It doesn't take much for one discontented person to trigger an avalanche in a tight knit social group. And that's why churches are particularly susceptible to this. And that's why God was so serious about grumbling in Israel.

People died because of their grumbling. Because it's not just, okay, here is your personal sin. That you should work on that. You should work on your grumbling. Try not to do that. Repent. Believe the gospel. No. It's your grumbling is contagious. For Your discontent can spread. And somebody who may never have ever even noticed the thing that you're discontented about because you pointed it out, that triggers something in them.

Now they're noticing it for the first time, and now they're sharing it, and they get upset, and it can escalate. So, in a tight knit social environment, grumbling can be very deadly. And that's why the New Testament speaks often about gossip and about grumbling, that, because it can be, it can have just a real destructive effect on a group of people.

And so often, the actual issue is pretty small. It doesn't have to be this major thing. Small things, when you add emotion to it, become big things. And you're dealing not just with the issue itself, you're dealing with the emotions. But the emotions are not always expressed as such directly. They're not saying, this is a small thing and I'm really angry about it.

No, they'll say, this is a huge thing! Their anger just bursts out. And that can destroy a lot of people's faith. That's self-sabotage not only to your own faith, but you're also sabotaging the faith of others as you, if you get caught up in this thing. Philippians 2, I'll just read one, one text about this.

Do all things without grumbling or disputing. That, so Here's the reason, here's the purpose. Do all things without grumbling or disputing that you may be blameless and innocent children of God, without blemish, in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life, so that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.

It's funny, I think Paul's guys, if you keep doing this grumbling thing, you're going to ruin it all. You're going to ruin all this ministry. I've been doing all this hard work. Stop it. I don't want to get to heaven and find out, man, I ran the race in vain because you guys are grumbling and complaining and disputing and so forth.

Okay. So those are three ways we can sabotage your faith. All three have some common themes of a root of discontentment. And as we've seen, this particular cocktail of sin patterns is self-sabotaging. Sabotage your faith and it can also spread and sabotage other people's faith. Now through the gospel, what do we do?

We epent of our sin. We receive forgiveness because of what Christ did on our behalf. He died in our place to forgive us our sins so that we can be cleansed and purified of all unrighteousness. So, we confess it to God as we see it. We receive by faith, his forgiveness, and then we grow in sanctification.

We repent and we make change and in the power of the spirit, God has enabled you Christian. To be able to grow in this area. So, I'll just conclude with one simple point of application, and that is if you have a discontented heart and a grumbling mouth. Repentance begins with one thing, and that's gratitude.

Gratitude is an antidote, because gratitude flips the envious, discontented heart around. Rather than being discontent with what you don't have, you're giving thanks for what you do have, even if in your mind it's small, you're giving thanks for it. There's a hundred verses I could read to you, this is probably my favorite.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances, that's key. Thank you. Not give thanks when things are, you're just bawling out and it's going great. No, give thanks in all circumstances for this is the will of God for in Christ Jesus for you. So, gratitude is an antidote for envy.

You're focusing on what you have, not what you don't have. And gratitude helps to starve envy of its power. Gratitude helps train your heart to away from the it trains your heart away from the comparison game. And I think this is a good to make it a daily practice. Especially if this is a struggle for you, if you've got the envy, the discontent thing going, the grumbling because things aren't going your way, if that's a feature of your life, you can make it a daily habit of just going through a list of things that, that you can and should be grateful for

And we all have things to be grateful for. So, you can be thankful for your friends, be thankful for your family, be thankful for your job. If you're married, you can be thankful for your spouse. If you have children, you can be thankful for your children. Thank God for your home. Thank God for your church.

And the strange thing is. And all the things I just listed, you could probably, wouldn't be too hard to identify imperfections in any of those things. Be thankful for my house. Have you seen my house? Be thankful for my car. Man, the thing hardly has wheels. It's falling apart. It doesn't start half the time.

Be thankful for that. Yes. Be thankful for that. Be thankful in all circumstances, even if you're, even if the thing is really broken and not nearly as good as what you would hope for, be thankful for that. Because there's probably something that you have, there's probably something that God gave to you and that you personally are dissatisfied with it, but somebody else who doesn't even have that thing at all may very well envy you for that thing.

So, there's, I should hurry through this. I'll tell you this quick story. Somehow, I know how, but it's funny just because of things that I've written in the last year or so, I've been gotten known and somehow as the singles guy. And so, I have this perspective of being a pastor in a church and then 15 years of ministry experience here, you see a lot of people that are just struggling mightily limping through very difficult marriages.

And then. And then last year, so I've talked to a lot of single people who are just like so hungry to be married and would probably say, it's I'd give anything to have a marriage that I could struggle through. I'd give anything to have a marriage I could just barely hang on with because I know that's a good thing and I value the good thing even with the challenges that come with it.

They're very well, the thing that you may be discontent about, somebody else may envy you that you even have that thing in the first place. And so, the antidote is always gratitude. The antidote is I want to be thankful for what I have, even if what I have is far from perfect. But I want to thank God because God has given me this thing.

God has blessed me. This is my lot, as it were, in life. This is where God has put me. And so, you're, you may hate your job. You might give thanks for my salary. Have you seen my paycheck? It's negative. I owe them money at the end of my pay period. Be thankful for these things. Give thanks for how God has blessed other people.

Whenever I was in Iowa, I was, I found myself thanking God for the gift that he gave this church and I was able to enjoy seeing how they were blessed and how, and I was able to minister to them. What a privilege that was. I was able to minister to them and be and to see God's people in this wonderful, healthy, faithful church.

God is blessing them, and God gave them something that I wanted that I'm tempted to envy, but I was able to give thanks for it and just celebrate. I'm like, man, I'm and I told my friend, man, I'm so happy for you. I'm happy for your church, for your ministry, I'm happy for your people. What a tremendous thing God is doing here, and that was incredibly freeing.

This kind of gratitude may sound impossible, but it is possible in Christ, because we know as Christians, we don't deserve any blessing that we have. Everything we have is a gift. Everything we've got is an undeserved gift of grace, and in Christ, we inherit the world, right? You know this, I think. Right now, your front yard may be this big, but in the new heavens and the new earth, we inherit everything.

We inherit the world, God's people together. So, everything we have is an undeserved gift of grace. Give thanks for your beat-up junkie car that's 35 years old and barely hanging on. Give thanks for your troubled marriage. Give thanks for your meager salary. Give thanks that your name is written in the book of life.

Give thanks that your salvation has been purchased by Jesus Christ. Give thanks that God knows your name. God knows you. He is aware of you. He's attentive to you. God cares about you. Be thankful for that. Be thankful that you have, by the Spirit, we have the mind of Christ. Be thankful that on your phone, you’ve got 50 different versions of his word.

Some of them are not so good. Like the passion version or the message or whatever. There's a piglet or no, it's the pigeon version. It's no, I'm a great, but you have good ones. Be thankful just at the access that we have to the word of God. Let me just, that really ought to be amazing to us.

It's I don't like this translation; it gets this or that wrong we have the word of God in our language. Imperfect, like as far as our translation may not be exactly what we'd want but be thankful for so many blessings that we have. We are so enormously blessed. Be thankful that the Holy Spirit of God indwells you and empowers you to, to obey and to grow.

Give thanks for the fellowship that we have in the body of Christ. Yes, we're flawed. Yes, this church is not perfect. We've got a lot of things that we could improve, but we've got each other. Amen. Amen. And we can be thankful for what we have. So let that, let the gratitude in your heart, if you commit to that as a discipline, I think you'll see a lot of improvement in these other areas of envy, discontent, pragmatism, grumbling.

You'll see growth in those areas. Okay, let's pray. Our Father and our God we have nothing that we did not receive. Everything that we have is a gift of your abundant grace. We don't deserve any of it. Lord, in our fallen state, we are sinful and rebellious. But by the grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we have been washed.

Forgiven, and we are being sanctified in the power of your Holy Spirit day by day. We are renewed in the gospel every week as we come into your house to, to taste the bread and the wine and to sing and to pray and make melody in our hearts and to hear the word preached and we are renewed in the gospel.

Thank you, God, for all the little random things that we might individually think of that we can and should be thankful for. You are good to us, Lord. You do not mistreat us. You do not deprive us of anything that we need. You take care of us because you love us. Thank you, Lord Jesus. And I say, Lord Jesus, because all of these things are a blood bought gift of Jesus Christ when he died on the cross so that all of the wrath that we deserved was poured out on him and all the riches and abundant blessings of being a child of God was given to us.

Thank you, Jesus. And so now as we come to your table. Meet us here. Fellowship with us if there's sin that we need to repent. I pray, Lord, that you'll show us those things and help us walk in repentance in the freedom of the gospel knowing that we are fully forgiven. So, conform us to your image day by day as we walk daily in sanctification.

We pray all of this in the name of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.