Today was the third week in my congregation’s late-summer message series: Major Truth from Minor Prophets, and the focal passage that I selected for this sermon was Malachi 3:6-12. Now if you don’t recognize this citation right off the bat, these are probably the only verses from Malachi that I’ve ever heard in the corporate worship of any church, and they deal with tithing. This is both a very good thing–because giving is certainly a theme that shows up repeatedly in scripture–and a challenging thing, because Malachi is about a whole lot more than tithing.
In the end, I decided to deal with the issue of tithing head-on, but not before examining some of the rest of Malachi’s message…a message which, to my way of thinking, has a lot to say about whole-hearted devotion. Our worshipers seemed to hear the message in the way I’d hoped they would. What do you think?
Malachi: Prophet of Whole-Hearted Devotion
