Welcome to this posting of the Weekend Sermon. I hope that you have had a good week and that everything is going well today.
I want to thank the Lord for allowing me to have a lot of writing work to do this week. I had an interview for a part-time job this week, and they are supposed to let me know if I got the job sometime early next week. Please pray that I will be able to get a part-time job soon.
I would also request your prayers in another matter. When you work for yourself, sometimes getting paid by clients can be a hassle. Right now, I am having problems getting paid for some work that I did. Please pray that this will be resolved quickly. Thank you.
There are many things that we all need to be in prayer for this week. Please continue to pray for those who were injured in the shooting in Texas. This terrible crime has left me deeply upset. Please pray for those who lost loved ones.
Continue to pray for those who were injured in the Las Vegas incident. Many are still in the hospital recovering from this.
Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands still have a long way to go before things are back to normal. Let us all pray that these areas along with other areas that have been damaged by storms will get the aid that they need to get things back on track.
I read an article the other day stating that the plague is bad in parts of Africa this year. Pray that this outbreak will end and those that are affected may recover quickly.
Let us all continue to pray for peace in this troubled world. Pray for peace in Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and Ukraine.
For our prayer focus countries, let us all pray for those in Morocco and Malaysia. Pray that many will hear the message of the love of Jesus.
Today, we will continue with our series of messages from the book of Malachi. We finished chapter one last week, and this week we will focus on the first half of the second chapter.
As we saw in chapter 1, the Lord is upset because the people of Israel were not showing Him the proper respect. The Lord is the King of all the Universe. He deserves the proper respect and honor due unto such a great king.
In chapter 2, the Lord through Malachi is telling the priests and the religious leaders that they are not honoring Him and performing their duties as they are supposed to. Just like the people they served, the religious leaders were not respecting the Lord. They should not have been accepting the improper sacrifices that the people were bringing. They should have instructed the people as to what was the proper way that they should serve and honor the Lord.
Also, the Lord was upset with the priests and the religious leaders because they were not teaching the ways of the Lord correctly. They were teaching people what was not true, and the people were being led astray by false doctrines.
So, how does this apply to us today. Let me start by saying that the Bible has a lot to say about the way that spiritual leaders are supposed to behave. They are supposed to be shepherds of the flock that the Lord has entrusted them with. They are to do this in imitation of Jesus the Good Shepherd and the example that He provided in John 10.
In the book of Ezekiel in particular, the Lord condemns those who are not performing the way that a good shepherd should. He calls them to do what they are supposed to do.
The Bible says that those who are called to minister to others will be judged by a different standard. This is because they have been entrusted with people's souls.
In our day, I see two ways in which religious leaders are not performing the duties of a shepherd as they should. First of all, some shepherds abuse those who they are put in charge of. This includes the physical abuse we saw among some Catholic priests and other clergy. This is not the only way that clergy can abuse the flock. Sometimes there is spiritual abuse. People feel so beaten down and condemned that they don't want to go to church anymore. They may even give up on God entirely because they have been spiritually abused.
I see people all the time who have had terrible experiences in the church. The clergy person that they trusted violated that trust in some way, and now they don't want to have anything to do with spiritual things. This is a great problem, and I believe that all those who teach really need to be aware of how they treat others and that they treat others the way that Jesus would treat people.
There is another aspect to how some religious leaders are acting like those in Malachi's day. They are teaching the wrong things. Many religious leaders in my country are so caught up in politics that that is all they ever talk about. Many others are teaching a type of prosperity teaching that has nothing to do with the Bible. Others have left the orthodox teachings of the Scriptures in the same ways as those leaders spoken about in the book of Jude.
So, what can we do. We can make sure that we are studying the Word of the Lord and following Jesus in spite of what some religious leaders may be doing. Since we have the Holy Spirit within us, we can let Him lead us into truth. We can ask the Lord to illuminate our minds so that we understand the Word more fully. We can pray that we will be doers of the Word and not hearers only.
We can spend time with Jesus every day. We can pray to Him and meditate on His words and on His presence within our heart.
Next week, we will finish chapter 2 of Malachi. On Monday, I will post the verses, and on Wednesday there will be a book review. May God bless you all. Amen.
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