THE PERILS OF APATHETIC LEADERSHIP
RETURN TO THE LORD SERIES
Good morning Life Fellowship. My name is Bobby Conway and I serve as one of
the pastors here at Life Fellowship. If you are a first time guest with us, we welcome you
to our church family. We hope that this will be a good opportunity for you to be able to
explore what it is God might be up to in your life, and maybe it will be an opportunity for
you to connect with some other people.
I do want to say at the outset that those of you in our church family that are
struggling with sickness, and some who are up against cancer and other issues, I really
want to encourage you to be open with your small group and the leaders. Make sure you
get together, pray and talk about it. And if you are a small group leader and you are
aware of someone that is going through a difficult time because of cancer or other issues,
be sure and rally around the family and be with them. I know in our church family we
have several people who have been struggling with cancer. Some have found
themselves in remission and we are thankful for it. Others still have active cancer. In
particular I would ask that you will pray for Bob and Joan Leffew as Bob’s brain cancer
is very, very serious right now.
And also it hit close to home yesterday as I received a phone call from one of our
elders, Steve Robertson. I would ask that you will be praying for him as he had a biopsy
this week and he found out that he has moderate prostate cancer. He will be going in
next week to find out the kind of treatments he will need. Obviously as he is an elder in
our church I want us to be aware of this, and let him know that we will be doing
everything we can to take care of him and to love him. Steve helped us start this church
13 years ago along with the Hatfields, and we will definitely be praying for Steve and his
family.
Also if you are sick and you are not in a life group, you probably will feel
isolated. So I encourage you to get in a life group so that we can have proper care taking
place for you if it is ever needed. The doctor is very optimistic about Steve that they are
going to be able to take care of it. The survival rate for where he is at is very, very
strong. We never like to hear that anyone has cancer, but now Steve has this problem,
and he is one of the most amazing persons I have ever met in my entire life. And those of
you that know him know that he is very joyful and loving. We just want to pray for Bob
and Steve and anyone else that is struggling with cancer and other issues. So now let’s
pray for the sick in our church.
Father, we thank you for our church family. We pray that as leaders we will all
help each other and care for the needs of those who are sick. And we pray for anyone
who is wrestling with cancer. There may be those who don’t even know that they have it
as yet, but we certainly want to pray for Steve and Bob. I pray that you will help our
church people to love each other well in difficulties. Help us to care for those who are
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hurting. Be with Bob and Joan and John and Gretchen and the grandkids and comfort
them through this time. Give them great medical wisdom and Lord, obviously we come
from the standpoint where we ask God in the name of Jesus that you would heal. And we
pray that you would heal Steve’s cancer as well as others who are struggling with
illnesses.
Lord, we also know that as we pray and we ask you to heal, we know that all of us
will die one way or another whether it is from cancer or a car accident or some other way,
so we are not naïve about that. So no matter whether it is sickness or health may we
glorify and honor you with the way that we live. In the name of Jesus we pray. Amen.
I want to start off by telling you a story that I came across. Some of you may
remember on July 6, 1984 when the Church of England commissioned an individual by
the name of David Jenkins to be its fourth highest ranking bishop. Now David Jenkins
rejected some core Christian doctrines, like the virgin birth of Jesus, and in particular the
resurrection of Jesus Christ. And many people obviously had a hard time with the whole
idea of this former Oxford University professor being put in as the fourth highest ranking
bishop in the Church, when he didn’t even believe in the resurrection of Jesus.
And obviously when we think about that we think that is an issue. And so we step
back and we wonder what happened. Well, he was commissioned. In fact there were a
group of people that were really protesting, and one even came out and said, “The only
thing that could stop him from being consecrated as a bishop would be lightning striking
the York Minister Cathedral where he would serve.”
And sure enough he was consecrated, but three days after he was consecrated, and
one day after his inauguration message, lightning actually did strike the southern portion
of York Minster Cathedral with a resulting fire. And the London Times would later
observe that there had been a bolt from heaven after the archbishop defended his own
appointment.
What had happened for the Church of England to get to a place to put someone in
such a high ranking position in the church when that leader didn’t even believe in the
central message of Christianity – the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Somewhere along the
way the people became apathetic and the leaders became apathetic. They minimized
what was to be maximized, and they lost sight of the message that God had in store for
the church. And a lightning bolt did strike just three days after his inauguration and one
day after his initial message.
Well, today we come to a passage in the book of Malachi as we are moving
through this series where the lightning is going to strike from heaven, so to speak. And it
is going to strike in the midst of the priests who have become absolutely sacrilegious in
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the way that they are leading God’s people. You see apathy is something that can happen
to all of us. And apathetic leadership is a dangerous place for us to be in. If we have
lived long enough we will all know what it is like to be apathetic. I know what it is like
to struggle at times with some indifference, feelings of moderation, being apathetic and
complacent. But those are warning signs for me to not ignore. And I know when that
happens that I need to explore, to ask myself some tough questions, to think about my
loves. And typically our apathy falls in place as Christians when our wants get mixed up.
Let me ask you a question – what is it that you want the most in life? Because we
will detect our ultimates through our wants. When we want God more than anything
else, when He is our ultimate, when we desire Him more than anything else, when He is
our greatest want it protects us from apathy. But when other wants come and trump that,
then the reason that we end up being apathetic is because we wanted something else more
than we want God. And we have to be careful that we don’t go and pursue money, and
make money our ultimate. Or make certain relationships our ultimate. Or make comfort
our ultimate. Or make power, beauty or education our ultimate, because when these
other things become our ultimate they will always leave us disillusioned. They will
always leave us empty.
God is to be our ultimate ultimate. He is to be the one that we want more than
anything. And when we lose sight of Him as our greatest want, we become apathetic.
And that apathy can affect us in our work place, it can affect us in our friendships, it can
affect us in our marriage and it can affect us in our parenting. That apathy can affect us
in all of life and it can wither us down into absolute hopelessness. And there are perils to
apathy, and in particular apathetic leadership. So we need to want to move our way out
of apathy.
So as we come to this passage today in Malachi Chapter 2, I would want to say to
you not to check out if you see yourself as a non-leader. It has been said before that
leadership is influence. And we all have influence in certain spheres of life, even if it is
just with our younger siblings. So we want to think about what kind of person we want
to be. And I want you to really think about that question – what is it that you want the
most? Is it God? Because if God is not your ultimate want, then that is going to create
some issues. There is going to be some apathy. There is going to be some indifference,
some complacency. And we want to do some probatory work in our own hearts this
morning together.
Now let us remember the context of the book of Malachi. There are 66 books in
the Bible, 39 in the Old Testament and 27 in the New Testament. There are different
types of genres. And Malachi is the type of book called a Minor Prophet. There are
Major Prophets and Minor Prophets in the Old Testament. You have historical writings,
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you have poetic writings and you have the prophets. And the prophets were broken down
into Major and Minor Prophets. The Major Prophets were the longer books such as
Isaiah and Ezekiel. The Minor Prophets were the smaller books. Malachi is the last book
of the Old Testament. And after Malachi’s message to the people, we have what is
known as the ‘silent years,’ where we don’t have any books of the Bible, we don’t have
any revelation, we don’t have any message from God that we are aware of for 400 years,
until the New Testament where John the Baptist and Jesus come on the scene.
So what has happened is Malachi is a prophet who was a post-exilic prophet.
Now I need to explain that again because if you missed this it is critical. You have preexilic prophets, exilic prophets and post-exilic prophets. Don’t let the names throw you
off. Pre-exilic prophets were people like Isaiah. What is a pre-exilic prophet? Well,
they were the prophets who were challenging God’s people before they went into exile,
thus they were pre-exilic.
We know that God’s people went into exile. That is to say they left Jerusalem
and the temple was destroyed. And they were taken away into captivity. And why did
they go into captivity? It was because they became complacent and apathetic and they
lost sight of what God wanted them to do. They didn’t have a heart for God. They didn’t
desire God. They were spiritually indifferent. They ignored God’s warning signs over
and over and over again. They were stubborn, stiff necked and rebellious.
God over and over again warned them through these prophets, these messengers
of mercy who would tell them to turn back to God, but they would not. And then these
issues would come. And what happened was Nebuchadnezzar took them into captivity
and they had to leave this place that was supposed to be where the Israelites were to live
and glorify God in Jerusalem. They were supposed to show the leaders depicting what a
God centered life looks like. They were to be this place where people could come and
see what it looked like to have the blessing of God on their lives.
But because they were not living according to God’s ways and they had adopted
the cultural ways around them, it forced God’s hand to act, because God sets His
community up to operate a certain way. So they were taken into captivity into Babylon.
And Nebuchadnezzar’s army destroyed the first temple that was built by Solomon as well
as the walls that surrounded the city. And so this place that was supposed to be a witness
for the world lay in ruins because they had lost sight of God and His greatness.
Now God’s people are off in Babylon. They had wanted to adopt the ways of the
culture around them and God gave them what they wanted. They were taken to Babylon
a place where they worshipped many gods. And while they were in captivity there were
exilic prophets like Daniel. The exilic prophets were prophets that ministered in the
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midst of the exile. And then there were post-exilic prophets. Now we know in our line
of history that Babylon was later overthrown by the Persians under the leadership of
Cyrus. And the Persian leadership then allowed God’s people to leave Babylon and
make their way back to Jerusalem.
What is interesting if you are looking for some history to back up the validity of
Scripture is the Bible prophesied that God’s people would go into captivity and even how
long they would be in captivity. And it prophesied that there would be a leader, Cyrus,
before he was even a leader and he would release God’s people to go back to Jerusalem.
Those prophecies are there in the Bible; it is unbelievable when you consider these
Scriptures from that standpoint.
So Cyrus lets the people go back. And they go back in three different stages –
under Zerubbabel, under Ezra and under Nehemiah. So they come back and they build
what was called ‘the Second Temple.’ So the first temple that Solomon built in all its
glory was destroyed, but the second temple was now in place. And it did not have the
glory of the former temple and the people struggled with that.
Nehemiah came in and he helped rebuild the walls, and Ezra helped them
resituate the community. But keep in mind that the people came back and they were
passive, they were complacent. Now I don’t think it started off that way. I think they
would have come back at this time and been excited and pumped up. But somewhere
along the way little by little they began to compromise. And before you know it they
were accepting sickly, emaciated, blind animals for the sacrifices. They had fallen into
the ways of the people to the point that the ways of God didn’t matter. They lost sight of
what they were to do again! This was after being in captivity and then getting another
chance.
And that is the way the human heart is – it is prone to wander, to wander from its
maker. To never really get to the core of what it means to love and worship Him. So
there they were in this spot that we saw last week where the leaders and the people were
apathetic. You would think that after all that had gone on they would have been reset and
passionate, but instead they became complacent again.
And yet God was still after them in His mercy as we saw in Chapter 1 and verse
9. But they were not interested in it. They were going to go their own way; they don’t
feel it. So now we come to a passage where God takes them to the woodshed. And we
don’t like that in our culture where God takes us to the woodshed. We don’t like that
because we are a culture that is anti-authority; we are very individualistic. We want to do
it ‘my way.’ We are relativistic in our beliefs. We are pluralistic in our outlook. And we
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do not like morals defined for us. We want to determine our own moral tracks and we
want to do things our way.
And what ends up happening is we need to realize that that is not the way that it is
in all cultures - but that is the way of our culture. In China they value authority. In
America we don’t. In China they value age, in America we don’t. In certain cultures
they have really high moral standards, and they wouldn’t even be interested in the Jesus
that is being tossed off as one who is pluralistic, relativistic, non-moralistic, an all grace
no justice kind of god. They would say no to that. They want a god who is just and a
god who is loving. But we have so adopted the ways of the culture that even in the
church it is becoming pluralistic, relativistic, moralless, just whatever fits you, antiauthority, I will do it my way and if I struggle with something I will just go and start my
own movement.
Let me give you a possible scenario. Let’s say you are a leader of a company and
you have people in your company literally changing your mission statement, casting
another vision, and you warn them and warn them, and it doesn’t matter, they just keep
doing whatever they feel like doing. It is destroying your company, destroying your
business and redefining it. Would you take action in that case? Of course you would!
And it is funny when it comes to our own businesses and money that is okay to
take action. But when it comes to God taking action for how we are supposed to live, we
will struggle against it. Suppose we hired someone at Life Fellowship and the person
began claiming they were the Messiah. Would you want us to act? Would you expect us
to do something about it? Of course you would! And we would definitely take action.
What if you were a baseball coach and a player decided to wear a basketball outfit
because that is how he wanted to express himself - would you be like, ‘That’s okay. You
can wear your basketball outfit.’ No, there are guidelines to play baseball, or basketball
or football. Would you go to a doctor and tell him how to treat you instead of how he
advises you to be treated? Of course not!
We have to realize that God has a vision. He had a mission statement for the
community. He was their leader and His people who were to represent His name and His
glory didn’t care about His ways, and they were redefining His mission. They were
changing His vision statement. And for God not to act would be intolerable. So He steps
in, and now we come with that framework in mind to Chapter 2 and verse 1. “And now,
O priests, this command is for you.” So this is the part where you think if you are a
priest that you are hosed, you are busted, you are in trouble. “If you will not listen, if
you will not take it to heart to give honor to my name.” That was to be the vision of the
community to honor God, to show what it looked like to have Him as their chief want.
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Instead they were changing the vision up, changing the mission up. And many people in
our culture today want the church to change the mission, to change the vision, to change
the way things are.
“If you will not take it to heart to give honor to my name, says the Lord of hosts,
then I will send the curse upon you and I will curse your blessings. Indeed, I have
already cursed them, because you do not lay it to heart.” Now let’s talk about blessing
and curse. What does it mean to have God’s blessing on our lives? It means to have
God’s favor in our lives. What does it mean then to have God’s curse on our lives? It
means the opposite of blessing, to not have God’s favor, to be kind of left to ourselves, to
walk according to our own ways, to experience a life without God’s direction and God’s
leadership. And which leads to all sorts of consequences for them.
So God say this is going to happen because they will not honor His name, they
will not keep His vision. And the reason this is happening is because they have not taken
it to heart. Well, what is the sign of apathetic leadership or apathy in general? It is when
we don’t take something to heart. Do you take messages to heart week after week? God
tells us in this book of Malachi that there are six oracles in the book. Last week we saw
the first one in verses 1 through 5. And He starts the book by saying, “I have loved you.”
But the people had lost sight of God’s love and His grace and His mercy.
Then God goes into the second oracle and He talks about the polluted sacrifices
and how the priests are appeasing people. And then this book says the people start
calling evil good. Do we see that happening in our culture today, turning evil into good,
trying to re-define what the purpose of the church is, trying to re-define who God is,
trying to make it more palatable and acceptable, trying to fit in with the culture. We see
all this stuff going on with people being driven by their feelings instead of what is true.
And it is because it isn’t taken to heart.
And God’s people didn’t take it to heart; they didn’t let it register. They became
apathetic. And in this book we are going to see different issues. They are going to call
evil good. They are going to try and re-define the mission of the temple. And we are
going to see that God challenges husbands to love their wives and not divorce them, but
to reflect His love to them. They were walking away from their spouses, and God is
going to talk about that, and also He is going to talk about not robbing Him. He is going
to get into social justice issues. All of these things are happening and they are not even
caring about it. They have lost sight of them. And God is going to give a vision of how a
community can be. He will speak to the family and speak to the economy and speak to
the leadership.
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So in Chapter 2 and verses 1 through 3 what is God doing? He is confronting
their apathy. Verse 3 says, “Behold, I will rebuke your offspring, and spread dung on
your faces, the dung of your offerings, and you shall be taken away with it.” First the
‘offspring,’ or seed in some translations is the Hebrew word zera. Some say it is really
talking about God rebuking their arm that is stretched out with offerings, so He is
rebuking their offerings. But then it can also be translated as literally their offspring, or
as seed that is planted in the ground. I am not exactly sure which interpretation is meant
here, but even if it is literally offspring we know that there are consequences that happen
to our loved ones, to our families for the decisions that we end up making in our own
lives. And as well our offspring, our families are blessed when we walk in God’s
blessing.
So God is saying they have ignored His ways, and ignored His rules for sacrifices,
and they have ignored caring for their families and the community. And the
consequences are no doubt going to affect all of those. So why would God provide these
types of warnings? He is not trying to be a moral policeman. He loves us and He wants
us to have His blessing and His grace. And He wants us to know what it is like to live
according to a way that would please Him and honor Him.
But they don’t take it to heart. And what you have when it comes to the way
people can be wired is like what Timothy Keller talks about with this idea of the
religious, the awe-religious and the gospel. The religious people are trying to earn God’s
approval by their good works. The awe-religious people think it is a license to live
however they want. They think God is a glorified sugar daddy who doesn’t care about
any moral boundaries or anything like that. They will sexualize their god, they will make
him pluralistic, they will do whatever they need to do. But that god ends up looking like
them and their values. It is re-defining God more or less according to their own values.
But then there is the gospel that is not working for salvation, doing good deeds for
salvation, but doing good deeds from salvation. And Timothy Keller in his book called,
‘Center Church,’ did a quick comparison of religion and the gospel. He says, “Religion
is, ‘I obey therefore I am accepted by God.’ But the gospel, the good news of Jesus is ‘I
am accepted, therefore I obey,’ like God’s kindness leads to repentance.”
“Religion is motivation based on fear and insecurity whereas the gospel
motivation is based on grateful joy. Religion, ‘I obey God in order to get things from
God,’ where the gospel is ‘I obey God to get God as my greatest want.’ It is to delight
and resemble Him. Religion, ‘When circumstances in my life go wrong, I am angry at
God and myself since I believe like Job’s friends that anyone who is good deserves a
comfortable life.’ But the gospel, ‘When circumstances in my life go wrong, I struggle
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but I know that while God may allow this for my training, He will exercise His Fatherly
love within my trial.”
“With religion, ‘My identity and self-worth are based mainly on how hard I work,
or how moral I am, so I must look down on those who I perceive as lazy or immoral. I
distain and feel superior to others.’ But the gospel, ‘My identity and self-worth are
centered on the one who died for His enemies, including me. Only by sheer grace am I
what I am. So I can’t look down on those who believe or practice something different
than me. I have no inner need to win arguments.”
So we know that in Christ, as Keller says, “I am sinful and lost, yet accepted. Yet
I am so bad that He had to die for us, yet so loved that He was glad to die for us.” So
Timothy Keller helps us to see what is going on here.
Now, what about the priests here in Malachi that God is dealing with? These
priests, I believe, are not even religious. They are awe-religious. They are going through
the motions with their priestly garb, but they are going through the wrong motions. Like
religion is going through the right type of motions from the wrong motives. Awereligion is going through the motions, but the wrong motions. They were accepting
blemished sacrifices. They were calling evil good. They were condoning and celebrating
the ways of the culture around them. They had lost sight of what it was to live for God.
And as a result these leaders would be humbled. And humbled from the
standpoint where God said He would take the dung of these animal sacrifices. In other
words, the leftover fecal matter from these sacrifices He would take and wipe it on their
faces. And just as the animals would be taken outside the camp and burned, so too the
priests will be taken out.
Now obviously that is a metaphorical situation. God doesn’t have literal hands;
He is not scooping into the sacrifice to get the dung. He is metaphorically saying they
have treated Him with little worth and they did not honor Him. He is saying that they
presented Him with unclean offerings and that He will present them as unclean by
humiliating them with this dung so to speak. In other words, if they were on ‘The
Apprentice’ He would be playing the Trump role and saying, ‘You are fired. You are
going to lose your role and you are fired.’
Now that is not being mean or being cruel. God gave them the opportunity to
serve as priests. God gave them the opportunity to walk in His blessing. God even
warned them. And He even said, ‘Come back and I will offer you grace,’ and yet they
continued to shake their fists at His ways. And so God stepped in. I think that is called
leadership. That is what we see here – God being a leader, guarding His vision, helping
things to go the way they are supposed to go.
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Roger Ellsworth in his commentary said it like this: “While the priests were not
committed to His name, God was committed to it. For God to ignore the disdainful
treatment of His great name would amount to Him dishonoring His own name, and
denying His own greatness.” Furthermore another commentator, Walter Kaiser, said
this: “How dearly must the ancient modern ministers of God have paid for their refusal
to bring glory to God’s name. The effects of a low regard for the ministry are still being
felt. We witness one wave of unbelief and disobedience after another among the clergy in
this century; it is no wonder that the parson is no longer the person in town.”
There was a time when the most respected people in the community were the
spiritual leaders because of the way that they lived their lives, because they did the right
thing even when they were perhaps tempted to do according to their feelings, because
they led with nobility, and they walked in uprightness. They were even considered the
intellectuals of the society, particularly if you look back at some of England’s leadership.
But all of that to say when we think about what is happening here, I can say as a
person who is a pastor that I hate when the question gets asked, ‘What do you do for a
living?’ I am tempted to say, ‘Well, I am a brain surgeon.’ If you said that you were a
brain surgeon, it would be kudos to you. But when you say you are a pastor you start
waiting for all of the excuses like, ‘Well, my sister’s cousin’s nephew was a priest or a
pastor too.’ Or it is like, ‘Hum, that’s interesting.’ Or, ‘Oh, that’s sweet.’ I love that
one. Is it sweet that I am a pastor? Or how about, ‘But you don’t look like a pastor.’ So
what am I supposed to look like? Am I supposed to wear the clerical collar? What does
that mean?
I have literally had conversations that get really weird after I tell them I am a
pastor. Recently I was in Orange County California after flying into the John Wayne
Airport. I was waiting in the bus and I started talking to another pilot and he asked me,
‘What led you to North Carolina?’ And I thought, ‘Great. Now I will have to tell him I
went out there to start a church.’ Now some of you are thinking, ‘Well, you should be
proud of talking about that.’ But it is not that, folks; it is the stereotype that we have
sometimes as pastors and I don’t like being lumped in with all pastors, because the truth
of the matter is there are a lot of things that are distasteful to people about pastors, church
leaders and clergy that I find just as distasteful too. I don’t like the fact that a lot of
things go on with pastors who are taking advantage of people. I don’t like the liberalism
that has happened and they end up having affairs with their staff. I just don’t like all of
that.
But I know all pastors aren’t that way. And all lawyers aren’t bad lawyers. And
all politicians aren’t bad politicians. And all car salesmen aren’t bad car salesmen. There
are decent ones in all those categories. Yet at the same token I don’t see myself as above
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sin, like I couldn’t fall. I realize that apart from the grace of God that I am capable of
anything. I ask God in His faithfulness to please protect me from my ability to be
unfaithful to Him. And I can tell you that as a person I don’t want to be that apathetic
leader that falls. I don’t want to be that statistic. And when that pilot asked me that
question, it was a little bit awkward for a little while. He had his share of issues that he
had with pastors and people that have fallen.
And you can imagine this community that we are learning about in Malachi’s
time were disillusioned with God. And these priests weren’t the real deal, they were
willing to change the rules up, they didn’t have any backbone. Our job as leaders is to be
faithful to God, and that needs to be more important that being popular before others. So
God confronts their apathy and He clarifies the Covenant as we come to verse 4.
“So shall you know that I have sent this command to you, that my covenant
with Levi may stand, says the Lord of hosts.” This word ‘covenant’ is going to come up
more as we are going to see the marital covenant and other covenants. We are going to
come up to this word covenant again and I will explain it further in the series. But for
now God says that He gave the covenant to Levi. It was a covenant of fear for these
priests and these leaders. It was really an Aaronic priesthood, so why is He talking about
a covenant with Levi? It was because they also served and did the temple works. So it
was all the people that were involved in helping in the temple work.
Verse 5, “My covenant with him was one of life and peace, and I gave them to
him.” That is what God wants for us – life and peace. And He says He gave them to
him. It was a covenant of fear, and He feared God. He respected God, he stood in awe of
God. Verse 6, “True instruction was in his mouth, and no wrong was found on his
lips. He walked with me in peace and uprightness, and he turned many from iniquity.
For the lips of a priest should guard knowledge, and the people should seek instruction
from his mouth, for he is the messenger of the Lord of hosts.”
So these priests were to provide wisdom and they were to walk uprightly, and
they would then experience the blessing and the peace of God. And then many of the
people would turn away from their sins when they were properly being taught. But now
what does God do? He shares how these particular priests, these post-exilic priests, were
corrupting the covenant. Verse 8, “But you have turned aside from the way. You have
caused many to stumble by your instruction. You have corrupted the covenant of Levi,
says the Lord of hosts, and so I make you despised and abased before all the people,
inasmuch as you do not keep my ways but show partiality in your instruction.”
So let’s step back from this and I want to say that the big idea of this passage
would be this: Leaders who forsake God’s name are eventually humbled for God’s great
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name sake. Let me say that again - leaders who continue to forsake God’s name are
eventually humbled for God’s great name sake. So what can we learn by means of
wrapping this message up practically? I would want to say that we as spiritual leaders
can be at peril, and I am going to give us some things to help us know whether or not we
are at peril.
We are at peril when we care more about our own reputation than God’s.
When our reputation leads us to compromise, when our reputation is more important,
when our comfort and the things that we want, and our desires, when we care more about
that than showing off God’s greatness and living for Him, we are at peril. And these
priests did not honor God’s name. They didn’t hallow it, they didn’t respect it, they
didn’t respect God’s ways and that was a problem.
As spiritual leaders we are at peril when we shun God’s warning signs
against our spiritual apathy. God can warn us through messages like this. He can warn
us through friends. He can warn us through family. He can warn us through
circumstances. He can even warn us through our moods, when we find ourselves getting
a little bit more temperamental and angry and having outbursts. We need to look in our
lives to find out if there is something going on, some apathy taking place that God may
be trying to show us.
One of the things that I have really been struggling with as I look out at our
culture is I am seeing lots of different leaders fall. We are seeing the church in a difficult
time. I had one spiritual leader this week speaking into my life saying, “This is a great
time for the church because it is going to get clearer who the real followers of Jesus are.
Those who are just kind of hanging out, those who really aren’t the real deal, they are
going to begin to fall away. Those who really don’t want God, that priority will slip
away. Now is going to be a real critical time.”
And I started thinking about why so many middle age leaders are falling. And I
thought about this because I am middle aged. I am 43 years old. I moved here when I
was 31 and Heather was 29 and we started the church. It is just crazy how fast the years
are going by. And now we are transiting into a new season. So I think about these
transitions like going from high school into the world. And then what it looks like to go
off to college. And then what it looks like to transition into marital life and into our
occupation. And then what it looks like to transition into parenting. So there are these
significant transitions that come in our life and if we don’t know how to handle them it
can lead to a lot of issues.
And this middle age season where the empty nest is coming can create a lot of
interesting dynamics. So I have been thinking about why so many middle aged leaders
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fall. I spent time and wrote some reasons out because I don’t want to be a middle aged
leader who falls. And here are some of my observations:
They quit taking risks in the name of becoming secure. Somewhere along the
way they lose their entrepreneurial freshness and it becomes all about being financially
secure and having job security, and they lose their edge.
They get overwhelmed by a collection of negative emotions that eventually get the best
of them. Life hurts. They get hurt in the work place, they get hurt in marriage, they get
hurt by others, and they end up wounded. And they get disillusioned in life.
They lose sight of their missional passion. Can’t you see this with these priests in
Malachi? They have just lost sight of it and all of a sudden they have all these other
wants because they have lost sight of their real mission.
They attempt shortcuts to achieve God’s vision. There are no shortcuts. And
waiting can be painful. I want to say if you are transitioning from young to middle age
you need to understand these kind of things. People can go too hard when they are
younger and they burn out as they get older and they can no longer keep up the pace.
They can go so hard that they exhaust themselves. They can get bored with their
marriage and their eyes can start to wander. They can start thinking, you know what,
maybe there is still time for me to go and start something new again and find somebody
new again. This can seem to be a lot harder that they signed up for. They feel like it is
really difficult and they want to start this thing over and get a new spouse.
Many aren’t prepared for the empty nest obstacles before them. They have put all
their eggs in one basket. They focused so much on their kids that they did not focus on
their marriage. And then as the empty nest season comes they realize that it is a mess.
They begin believing it was all about them somewhere along the way, about their
happiness, about their comfort, about what they want, about what will make them feel
good. And it creates issues.
They develop a sense of entitlement that clouds their reality. They feel
experienced, they feel they don’t deserve this. They have done this and they have done
that. They have accomplished all these things. They have lost their passion for God and
their heart wanes cold.
They isolate themselves from true and meaningful friendships. They don’t really
want to get deep. They have acquaintances, but not friendships, not heart to heart, not
willing to say, ‘Tell me what you think.’
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They become know-it-alls and lose their teachable spirit. They think they can
figure it out their own way. They think they know what is best.
And finally, they put all their eggs in one basket and have no outside hobbies.
They have become defined by their mission that they now despise and so they crash.
Those are some of my observations on why middle aged leaders fall and I am
going to continue to think about that question. My goal is to be faithful to the end, and
that is what I would want for you. We have to think about how we transition through
things because each transition brings a new set of emotions that require us to go in and
think about what we want the most. Those leaders lost it. They lost sight of their
mission.
Next I think leaders are at peril when our popularity becomes more
important than our personal faithfulness. These priests were willing to do whatever
they wanted. They were accepting all the sacrifices no matter how unworthy. Instead of
leading the people they were led by the people. And when a leader no longer leads out of
principle, but is a people pleaser, he has lost his leadership.
As spiritual leaders we are at peril when we lead others astray by bending
God’s word to appease our culture. That is what the priests did. They were Bible
benders. They were willing to water the word down. They were willing to make an
exception for themselves. And when you find yourself making exceptions for yourself,
redefining the word of God to fit your circumstances, to fit what would feel good for you,
that is a very dangerous spot to be in. Be careful that you don’t listen to your feelings
because you may have just created God in your own image. You may have fashioned
God after your own liking and not even realized it.
As spiritual leaders we are at peril when we fail to take our personal walk
with God seriously, to pursue His heart, to desire Him. And the priests obviously quit
doing that. As spiritual leaders we are at peril when we find ourselves showing
favoritism to others for our own self-centered purposes. And when we look at verse 9
of Chapter 2 that is what they were doing. They were showing favoritism. “And so I
make you despised and abased before all the people, inasmuch as you do not keep my
ways but show partiality in your instruction.”
Hopefully this is a warning sign for us but now how can we experience God’s
blessings in our lives? As spiritual leaders we will experience God’s blessings when we
are passionately committed to revering God’s great name. That is certainly what we can
see in Malachi. We need God to be our greatest want, we need Him to be our greatest
ultimate.
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As spiritual leaders we will experience God’s blessings when we faithfully
communicate God’s truth, when we teach God’s word, when we look to see what it even
says before we speak up on what His opinions are about things. Some people have never
spent more than 20 minutes in the word of God but they are ready to be God’s
mouthpiece and talk about what God values and doesn’t value. And what they are really
giving people is their emotional feelings on something and not God’s truth.
As spiritual leaders we will experience God’s blessings when we live according to
His moral standards, when we walk with Him. As spiritual leaders we will experience
God’s blessings when we help people cross correct their life. And when we look in
verses 4 through 7, what we see is that covenant that they had previously walked in
holiness. They had helped teach the truth, and they had helped people correct their lives.
So with this in mind, as God’s messengers that is what we are to do. We are to
turn people toward the truth. We are living in a very critical time. Jesus said, “If anyone
comes after me he must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” Jesus did not
offer us a Candyland Christianity. He did not offer us a Love Boat Christianity. Jesus
invited us to come and die with Him if need be. Jesus invited us to stand strong with
Him. Jesus invited us to not try to fit in but to stand out, to be the light of the world, to be
a city on a hill, to be the salt of the earth. He invites us to a place where we really reflect
in our hearts and to ask ourselves if we are being honest with ourselves and if we are
being honest with God. Where in our hearts do we need to turn some things over so that
we can move away from the perils of apathetic leadership and begin to live the life that
God blesses. Let’s pray.
Father, I pray that you will use this message of our series to our hearts and in our
life. I pray if anyone is struggling with what I have shared that they would look at the
text and ask themselves if that is what is going on with them. Lord, we have to come to
the place where we believe the Bible or we don’t. I thank you, Jesus, that you came and
died on a cross for all of our apathy, for our indifference, for our complacency, for all the
different idols that we have created in our hearts.
And I pray, Jesus, that you will help us to want a relationship with you because
you came from heaven to earth and died on a cross for all of our sins and imperfections.
And when we by faith trust and believe in you we can realize we are not working for our
salvation but out of glad gratitude we serve you from our salvation. I pray, Lord, that we
will be a church that is willing to do the right thing even when it is difficult, to walk with
you, to please you. And may we be a church that mirrors your passion before the culture
around us. We love and praise you. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
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The preceding transcript was completed using raw audio recordings. As much as possible, it includes the
actual words of the message with minor grammatical changes and editorial clarifications to provide context. Hebrew
and Greek words are spelled using Google Translator and the actual spelling may be different in some cases.
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