God, Do You Care About My Commitments? | Malachi 2:10-16

covenant. Has not the one God made you? You belong to him in body and in spirit. And what does one God seek? Godly offspring. So be on guard. Somebody say, be on guard. Be on guard. Do not be unfaithful to the wife of your youth. The man who hates and divorces his wife, says the Lord, the God of Israel, does violence to the one he should protect, says the Lord Almighty. So be on your guard and do not be unfaithful. Let's pray together. God, open our eyes that we might see you are ears that we might hear you and break our hearts as we learn to love you. It's in Jesus' name we pray. Everybody said amen. You may be seated. I want to talk today very simply. God, everything we've done this series has been framed in questions. This week's question is this: God, do you actually care about my commitments? God, do you care about my commitments? The big idea for me to dive into this, we're going to back up to verse number 1 of chapter 2. The world may break its commitments to you, God never breaks his commitments. And the God who keeps asking you to become someone bigger than yourself wants you to keep your commitments. So does God care about your commitments? God does care. Yes. The challenge is, are you committed to you? Do you care enough about yourself to be who God's called you to be? 'Cause every broken commitment starts with a broken relationship with yourself. Because you disrespect you, you'll disrespect other people. I'll prove it to you. Let's go back up to verse 1. You have your Bibles, keep your Bibles open. Let's go back to verse number 1. Dr. Hartfield did a great job, and these, these verses run together. If we're going to run through these texts, chapter 2, verses 1 through 9, when the, the, the move turns, look at verse— look at verse number 2 of chapter 2. If you do not listen, God says, if you do not resolve honor for my name, says God, I will send a curse on you. I'll curse your blessings. I've cursed them because you've not resolved to honor me. And because of you, I'll rebuke your descendants. I'll smear on your faces the dungs from your festivals and be carried off with it. God says, when you dishonor me, he says, I will curse you. I will curse your blessings and your descendants. Anything that you call blessed, I will call cursed. God says, because you don't honor me, look at verses 4 through 6. And you will know that I've sent this warning so my covenant with Levi will continue, says the Lord. My covenant, verse 5, was with him, a covenant of life and peace I gave to him. And this called for reverence, because he revered me and stood in awe of my name. True instruction was in his mouth. God says, you dishonor me, that's what I'll do. Because God says, here's what I always want to keep doing. I want to keep my covenants with you, so quit dishonoring me. This covenant speaks to the, the peace God gave Phinehas, Aaron's grandson. God promised Phinehas and his descendants a perpetual priesthood priesthood because he honored God. This Levitical covenant was then renewed in Jeremiah 33, connecting to the Davidic covenant. Here's what I want you to see: God always keeps his promises. We shout on that. The challenge is, do you keep yours to God? Amen. The question is never, can you trust God? The question is, can God trust you? So how do we do this? Look at verses 7 and 9. It's going to get to where I'm getting today. You got to respect yourself. Look at what he says. For the lips of a priest ought to preserve knowledge, because he's a messenger of God, and seek instruct— people seek instruction from his mouth. But you turned away from this teaching and caused many to stumble and violated this covenant. So I've caused you to be despised and humiliated among the people, because you have not followed my ways and showed partiality to the law. God says, so number 3, you got to respect yourself. You have a responsibility to preserve knowledge. You have a record. though, in spite of your responsibility, your record is worse. You've turned away and caused people to stumble. So what God is saying is, because you know better, you got to do better. God is disappointed when we don't do what God has called us to do. And so God says to the priests, you're supposed to keep worship sacred, and I'm disappointed in you because you don't respect yourself enough to respect where I called you. I've given you a weight on your shoulders. and you disrespected me. You sought to figure out ways to carry it your way instead of asking me how to carry it. So here, when you don't respect yourself, you settle for things beneath you. I want to say this again: when you don't respect yourself, you settle for things beneath you. So because the priests didn't respect themselves, they didn't respect other people, and they didn't respect God. And that's what leads us to verse number 9. God gets into this text and says, you— if you don't respect me, You can't respect God. And if you don't respect yourself, you're not respecting your gifts and your story. And so many of you, you're mad at other people because people see more in you than you, you see in yourself, because you're so used to disrespecting yourself, you don't know how to handle when people respect you. So you take it as an insult when people call out the goodness in you because you are so used to seeing God through disrespect to you. God says, I want you to understand I did not waste my time giving promises to you. I keep them. Don't give me a reason not to. Yes. So let's walk through the text. Look at verses 10 through 16. Here's the first movement. Verse number 10 is the first movement. So look at the text. Verse number 10 says, here's the foundation of every commitment. Here's the foundation of every commitment you have. Verse 10, have we not all one Father? Has not God created us? Then why are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our fathers? So God drops a huge Hebrew word here, the word bagad. The word bagad we see 6 times in these— 5 times these next 6 verses. And what God is saying here is this is a habit of your heart. He's naming a systemic issue. He is saying here the foundation he names before failure. He says we have one Father, we have one God, you have an obligation to keep your word that is rooted in something that's bigger than you. I have made a covenant with your ancestors that you weren't there for that extends to you. God says, so don't fracture what other people fought to keep. The promises over many of your lives were not things you prayed for. It was things other people prayed for you. It was something God gave you that's bigger than you. Your commitment is not to people, it's to God. And the reason we are so comfortable— the other person's failure to keep your commitment changes nothing about God's commitment to you. Don't give God an excuse to not be committed to you. So look at verses 11 through 12. Look at the text says, Judah has been faithless. An abomination in Israel has been committed, for Judah has profaned the sanctuary of the Lord and married a daughter of a foreign god. I want to give you context. In the Persian period, Yehud is a small economically fragile province under control. Heavy taxation, large concentration, social stratification. The gap between the powerful and the struggling was widening every single season. So in here, the way to stop the poor to being poor in this community was to marry the daughter of a foreign god, was the political and economic move. So what these men would do is they would get into a marriage, realize that the marriage they're in was not going to benefit them, so they found a woman who was who was submitted to a foreign god, a false god, because to them, they were marrying into wealth, marrying into influence, and marrying into Persian power. They were trading up, if you will. They were moving from, I don't know, the Arizona Cardinals to the San Francisco 49ers, right? The original wife was still there. They were still married, but they married to another family to get power. They wanted to be somebody, but they wanted to keep this covenant with God so that just in case this didn't work out, at least I got this. Y'all know exactly what I'm talking about in the world. It's the person in the company who leaves out the company once it gets funded, and then all of a sudden leave out, take the money, and let the company fall apart. It's the church that prayed for you before you had a platform. Now you don't even talk about the church. It's the neighborhood you grew up with, but you never want to go back to it. God says the wife of your youth was your original covenant, the commitment you made before you had power. And while it has less money in the world, it has more power with me. The question this text presses is, what do you do when you got options? That's why when people lose weight, they change. Have you ever noticed that? They lose 50 pounds and all of a sudden they so fine, they change because now they got options. What do you do when you have options? What do you do when you realize how anointed you are and that God kept you, but now you got people telling you how great you are? What do you do when you have options? God says the— here's verses 13 through 14. Here's the next movement of your commitments. So when you skip over your word, movement 2, movement 3, verses 13 through 14, the altar knows everything. So God says, this is what you did here. He says, you got options and you went to the other option. What do you do when you have options? God says, so then you come to the altar, verses 13 through 14. The second thing you do, you then cover the Lord's altar with your tears, with weeping and groaning, because God does not accept your offering. Why doesn't he? Because God was the witness with your first wife, and God is the witness of your second one too. Right. God says, here's the issue. He's the, the grace and the pain. He says, on the same altar that knows everything, I hear the tears of the one you left. And on the same altar, I hear your fake tears trying to make sure I don't take my hand off you. God says, on the same altar are 2 sets of tears. God says, I receive one set of tears, I reject another set. The first set of tears that God says he receives, I receive the tears of the women who gave everything in covenant, but now their home is insecure, they are economically vulnerable because you wanted power and didn't want me. God says, I hear their tears. And to the hurt and harmed in the room, God says, I hear every tear that's not your fault. I'm talking to people in the room who've been hurt, who've been left, who've been thrown away. God says, I hear your tears. And God says, I hear them and I cover them. And then on the other side, I hear the tears of the betrayer, because you're on the altar too. And here's what these priests were doing. They were weeping and wailing on the altar because they They knew that God's hand was off of them, and God says, "I hear your tears, and I don't want them." They believe in God. They came to the altar, and they brought relationships now that won't work. And God is saying, "I know where the problem is. I was in the room when you made the first vow, and I was in the room when you made the second one. I don't hear the second one." And here's what God says. Here's the grace in all this text. He tells them the problem is: I was the witness of your. whole life. The altar publicly cannot change what you won't let my word do privately. He is pointing back to their hearts in this text and says there's some things you cannot shout your way out of. There are— there's a whole crux of the sermon. There are some things you cannot scream and praise and give your way out of. Some things require you to get the fear of God taking his hand off you for you to do the hard work of having God in your heart and not just God in your mouth. Yes, yes. I'm talking good in this Anglican church because I'm talking to some of you in the room who think if you scream harder, God will set you free. And let me tell you, the scream God hears He hears the scream of the people you stepped on to get to where you are. And so the people who've been stepped on, God hears you. I want to be really clear about this. God hears you. God understands you. God knows you. God has not forgotten about you. And that's why in the quiet moments of your life, when you ask yourself the question, why hasn't everything fallen apart? God says, because I hear your tears. And for those of you Who are the priests in this text who've stepped on people to get to the top? For those of you who have manipulated people with your words, God says, "I hear your tears too, and I pour them right back out." Here's the work you've got to do. Here's the hope God gives you to all of you who know you're wrestling with that. Here's what God says. Look at verses fifteen and sixteen. Did not I make you one? God says, "What am I seeking?" seeking from you, godly offspring. Here's the one thing I need you to do: guard yourselves in the Spirit. Guard your spirit. Here's the principle. Verse 15, here's the last movement: guard your spirit. God gives the same command twice. You gotta guard your spirit, the inner life where your commitments are formed, where you begin to rationalize what you can or cannot do. God says you've got to work The word there is the word rach, or it's the word we get the seed of our intention. It's the place where your decisions are made before they come out of your breath. As a man thinks in his heart, so he becomes in the world. God says, I need to deal with how you're thinking in your heart, because the reason you were comfortable going to find women of another god is because you didn't respect me. We break external commitments because you stop guarding who you are on the inside. So what is God seeking when you do that? He says, I'm seeking this so that you can have godly offspring. He says there's a generation you never see that is seeing how you navigate this moment. The reason God had to be silent for some 400 years is because they didn't navigate this moment well. God had to raise up an entire new generation to handle Jesus. He could not send his Messiah to this generation because their hearts were not ready for the Messiah. They were begging for. Someone behind you is building their life on the commitments you make today. So here's what God is saying: You got to guard your intentions. You got to guard your heart because who you are inside matters. There's people you'll never meet who are going to understand what it means to be a Christ follower because they watch you. That's the text. The text says four movements: You have one God, one Father. That's your foundation. The political trade up when options come to you. What are you going to do with the? What are you going to do when you have options? The altar hears everybody's tears. The prescription, you gotta guard your heart. Every covenant has the same story. You have to deal with your inner man because every broken commitment in this text started with a broken relationship with yourself. Identity then is a challenge of who we are to God. What does God say about God's self, and do you believe it, and do you trust it? Well, here's a way I can give it to you. One day, to deal with this identity crisis, Moses had murdered a man, ran away, got married, had a whole new life, thought he got away from everything. One day a burning bush shows up. Burning bush being burned, not consumed. He goes into the bush and asks a simple question, what— who are you? God says, I am that I am. Yes. Here's a principle I want you, every person, to have before you leave out of here today. If you never have an I am, you'll always be a you are. That's so good. If you never have an I am, you'll always be a you are. God's I am was in Egypt. God's I am was in the wilderness. God's I am was at the burning bush. What is your I am? What do you stand on when life has you on fire? What is your I am? Because if you don't have an I am, you'll be a you are. And you are is what other people assign you. You are is the identity that gets handled to you from the outside. You are is what people give you when they break you. You are someone whose trust isn't worth keeping. You are someone who gets left. You're someone whose covenant is not worth it because you're keeping your word based upon what people say about you. Then who are you? What is your I Am? Because you are not a you are, you are an I Am. But if you don't know who you are, you'll always be what other people call you. You're always mad, you're always sad, you're always frustrated, you're always disappointed, you're always down, you're always anxious, you'll always be depressed. Because if you don't have an I Am, you'll always be a you are. What is your I am? Because the world has an I am waiting for you. The world has a you are— excuse me— waiting for you, and the only way you combat the you are is when you know your I am. What did you accept? Here's some questions I want to ask you. Where did you accept a you are that was never yours to carry? Wow. Whose voice handed you an identity about your worth, about who you are, and you took it because you were more comfortable in being a you are than an I am. Because the you are is the thing that drives you to broken commitments. Amen. The men accepted an identity shaped by empire. The men accepted identity shaped by money, by social pressure, and they started living into their you are instead of who they are. I am. Here's my challenge to every person in the room: you got to get your I am back. Broken commitments are an identity problem. You keep your word when you think your word means something. You stop keeping your word when you don't think your word means something. I can tell a man who's fallen apart when his handshake gets weak. Mm-hmm. Because when your word means something, I'll look you in the eye and shake your hand. Yes. My word doesn't mean— every man in the room knows what I'm talking about. When I can't trust you, you don't look me in the eye and shake your hand. The moment you don't know who you are, you become everything the world tells you you can be. This is your identity. Here's some questions I want to ask you. Do you believe your word means something? When you said you're going to do something, do you believe there's a version of you that will actually follow through? Or have you been watching yourself miss for so long that you stopped yourself to show up for yourself. Do you believe you're something worth protecting? Yes. What have you been told by people, by a system, by a church, by a family member, that you are not a priority, so you stop protecting you, and now your spirit has been slowly eroding from the inside because you don't have a life that can protect the covenant that flows from it? Your identity has to matter to you before you ask anybody else to be committed to it. Yes. So guard your spirit. Here's the thing about spirit stuff, and I'm finished. The identity leaks. Identity leaks. It's very easy for me to get up here and talk about like a who are you sermon and how to be yourself sermon, but what happens is there are slow leaks in the tire of yourself that if you don't guard your spirit, There's a reason why God said this over and over in the text consecutively. You know what he never says though? God never says guard your marriage. God never says guard your promises. God never says guard your reputation. God says guard your spirit. Why? Because identity leaks slowly and gets into the things you say. Identity leaks slowly and then gets into what you love, how— what you tolerate, where you quit, what you abandoned. Identity leaks. Nobody Nobody wakes up one morning and says, I'mma be a bad person. It leaks. Something happened in your spirit before you got comfortable with breaking it. Because behavior— before behavior is public, identity is private. These leaders left themselves long before they got married to foreign women. They thought about it. How can I balance 2 families? How can I find them? How can— where do I need to worship? What do I need to learn? What books do I need to read? What systems do I need to become comfortable with? comfortable with? What things do we need to push down in me to be comfortable weighing women of a foreign god? What do I need to do? How much do I need to worship? How can I perfect my worship so that it looks fake enough in front of other people before other people see it? God says there were so many identity leaks in them before they got comfortable walking down the aisle with another woman. Some of you are guarding the wrong thing. You're guarding your children, your home, your marriage, and your reputation when God says, I need you to guard your spirit. Amen. Are you committed to yourself? 'Cause then it leaks. Here's the 2 principles I wanna give you. So how can you be committed to yourself? Here's the 2 principles I wanna give you today that can get out your hair. Number one, if you're gonna guard yourself, number one, I want you to curate the voices that name you. I want you to curate the voices that name you. You are the sum total of the people you ask to pray for you. Who are you asking to pray for you? Mm. 'Cause every voice that knows you and names you is trying to answer one question: who are you? Your phone has an answer. Your algorithm has an answer. Your bank account has an answer. Your past has an answer. The empire had an answer for the priests. And if you don't have an answer and have the voices around you that are pouring into who God's called you to be, it'll get louder than the covenant God has with you. And the moment the wrong voices get loud, it'll erode who you are and narrate a different life. Before voices change your behavior, they change your biography. Guard who gets to name you. Ask yourself this week— I'm not going to yell on the screen today— who defines success for you? God. Whenever you make a decision, who do you feel you got to consult with to be okay with who being God called you to be? No, seriously. When you apply for a job that God told you to apply for, when you started a business that God told you to start, when you got into a relationship God told you get into, who did you have to check in with to be okay with what God told you to do? God does not matter to you as much as their voices. For some of you, you worship your mama more than you worship God. For some of you, it doesn't matter what God says; it matters what your father says. It doesn't matter what God says; it matters what your boss says. You know why? 'Cause your boss defines your worth. So what defines a good father for you? It's not what your children say. What defines what a good woman is for you? Who defines who a good husband is for you? Your husband, your wife, your spouse, your children don't. You, you need God to be the one who guards you because somebody is answering those questions. Who are you curating around you that forces you back to your knees and not to their So my challenge to you every day this week, I want you to read an identity passage out loud before you get into the world. Allow God to tell you who you are. Yeah. Because I don't want you to get into this world of manifestation. I want you to remember what God has already said. The promises of God are yes and amen, not possible. You don't have to manifest what God has declared. Okay, you don't have to manifest what God has already spoken over you. You got to trust it. The problem with this generation I'm seeing right now— by generation, it's not age, it's all this foolishness in the spirit— we are trying to manifest stuff that God never said. Wow. But when you know who you are, you don't need to make up a narrative about you. You trust what God has already spoken over you, because the loudest voices in your life become the ones that are on the inside of your heart. Number 2, here's the second principle: I want you to rehearse your integrity every single day. My son was in a play at his school. He's in play at school, and, uh, they had rehearsal every Tuesday after school, every Thursday after school, every Friday after school for 4 hours. Had the stupid rehearsal for the stupid I was like, this is a kids' play. This is a play for people in elementary school. And he's rehearsing from 3 to 5, 3 to 5, and then 12 to 4, 3 days a week for 2 months for a play at an elementary school. Then the week of, he had to go to the place they're gonna have the play because they couldn't have it in the gym because it was such a big play. They took the play to another place and he had to rehearse there half a day for an entire week for a play at elementary school. Because they wanted to make sure every kid had every note right, every kid had every line right, everybody's outfit fit, everybody knew how to stand on stage, everybody knew how to deal with the big lights. They wanted to make sure that for 4 hours a day every— for 2 months. And for 4 hours a day every single day leading up to 2 performances. They rehearsed for 2 and a half months for 2 hours. Why does my son give more energy to the prince of Egypt than some of us give to our integrity? Rehearse your integrity every single day. Rehearse your integrity. Some of you make commitments and you don't keep any of them. You declare it at the altar on Sunday, man, you snotting and foaming at the mouth, but by Tuesday you have forgotten what you told God you're going to do on Sunday. So you write the vision, make it plain, but you forget it by the weekend. And every time you make a promise and don't keep it, your soul takes a note of how far it can go without following through. And after enough notes, you begin to tell yourself you can't follow through. This is what I can't do, because it has too much evidence to tell you that you actually do do what God tells you to do. Your spirit— hear me— listens to your life more than your words. So my challenge to you: I want you to keep one promise this week. No, no. I want you to call back the person you said you're going to call back. I want you to show up to the meeting you said you're going to show up to. I want you to pray when you said that you're going to pray. Don't leave out of here today. Oh my God! Pastor convicted me. I need to be a person of prayer. You better do it. I want you to show up for the people you said you're going to show up for. That's right. I want you to read what you've committed to read. Yeah. I want you to go to bed when you told yourself you were going to go to bed the first time. Yes, yes. Because your soul needs evidence and exhibits that if God calls you to go start a business, You've got enough follow-through that knows you won't give up when it gets hard. Right. Because your soul is saying, we're not gonna keep our commitments, so we'll start, but we don't finish. Every kept promise tells your soul, I'll protect you. Every kept promise tells your soul, you can trust me. Because the world has— can trust your word, but your soul has to trust it first. So your spirit is where your life repeats, and that's why guarding your spirit is so important. So what is your I am? So you're not a you are. This is what I love to do with people I mentor all the time, but I'm finished. I do this with people I mentor all the time. I tell them all the time, I say, listen, if you want to reconcile who you want to be, who God's calling you to be, here's what I want you to do. Every person do this. Every, every eye is closed. I'm finished. I want you to think about this for yourself. I want you to imagine yourself 10 years. Everything goes well. You're a person of prayer. You go to the gym. You're following through. I want you to imagine yourself in 10 years. I mean, everything goes the way you're— I'm not talking about manifesting nothing. Who are you in 10 years? Every single thing goes the way you are saying it's going to be, and you walk in this room right now. What are you wearing? How do you talk? How do you show up? What— how do you look? What is your weight like? How do you show— what scriptures have you memorized in 10 years. Every, every eye is closed. You ain't got to look at me. I want you to think to yourself. Imagine yourself, everything goes the way you've been praying it goes in 10 years, and you walk in the room. Who's with you? Your soul cannot afford you not to become who God is calling you to be. The hardest battle many of you are going to fight is the battle to keep your word to yourself. I don't want you to get comfortable not keeping your word to you, because the moment you don't keep your word to the person who just walked in this room is the moment you stop keeping your word to God. The moment you get comfortable not keeping your word to others— I don't know what's broke you, I don't know what's hurt you, I don't know what's harmed you, but may this be a summer of being committed to who God has called you to be. Making decisions for your identity and not making decisions from your wounds. Father, in this room right, right now are people, multiple sets of people in this room right now. People, God, who wanted to be recommitted to you. People, God, in this room who know that they've eroded trust with you. People, God, in this room who know that they have not been committed to their word to you. People, God, in this room who know that while they've been showing up, they might Not been standing up with you, Father. Forgive us, Father. Hold us to our commitments to you. Some of us in this room, God, have not been committed to others. We've harmed people. We've insulted people. We've manipulated people. We've betrayed people. And God, we're wrestling with the parts of ourselves that we've harmed other people. And God, in the same room are the people who've been manipulated and hurt. Father, I pray that you hear. Their cry, that you hear their tears, that you hear their presence. Cover the hurt heart, that they may not let their identity be construed or constrained to somebody else's sin. Cover the person, God, who was harmed, that they may know that the same blood that carried on the cross is the same blood that'll wash their sins away. Give them not another chance, but give them grace to understand what chances are. Recover, God, those who've been harmed. And God, remind them of your grace, your favor, your love, your adoration over them, God, in spite of all the hurt and the harm that they've experienced, that your love has been bigger than everything negative. I pray, God, that you would change their minds, you would change their thinking patterns, you would change the ways they pray, that they don't get consumed with what happened to them, but they get consumed with how you love them. And for those of us in the room today, God, who are not committed to ourselves, Forgive us. Hold us accountable so that we don't fall into the traps of what the world says is okay, but that we fall into your arms knowing that only walking with you, trusting you, is where we need to be. Draw me nearer to you. Draw our hearts nearer to you. Draw our