God First, Mysterious Messenger Second

There are many moments in the Bible which I would have loved to have been a part of. There are many great leaders and heroes that I would love to meet. Moses with his arms raised as the waters of the Red Sea split apart. Or Elijah as he lay the smackdown on the prophets of Baal. Or even the young David as he slings a stone into the forehead of that giant oaf, Goliath.

There were prophets and priests and kings, oh my!

But it would almost seem as if God's bag of tricks had run empty by the end of the Old Testament. Things were quiet. Beaten down Jews were returning to their land, but God's presence seemed to be incognito. The glory days are gone and the promise of a Messiah seems long in coming.

From this rises a messenger named Malachi, which ironically means...'messenger'. A guy whose message was to remind people that God loved them. He didn't draw attention to himself. He didn't appear to be a flashy guy. He starts and ends with a simple message.

God loves you. He always has. This is why, appropriately so, we end the Old Testament with a prophet that we don't know much about. The significance does not lie with Malachi. The significance is in the message.

Comments

Accountable

I recently officiated a wedding. The ceremony was simple, lovely, and ended with another couple professing to keep the covenant of marriage. But it all started with a clarification...from me. At our first premarital counseling session, as I have done with every couple I have agreed to marry, I clarified a couple of matters. First, I officiate Christian weddings, where both spouses-to-be are professing Christians. I firmly believe that marriage is difficult enough, without adding disagreements about God into the mix. Second, as a minister of Jesus Christ, I believe the pastor’s role in a wedding is to represent the blessing of God on that union. So we have several sessions of premarital counseling where we discuss married life. It’s not that I have this imaginary card in my head, with a picture of me on the front and my stats on the back. (You know, like a baseball card.) Ok, I do picture cards. Pastor cards! And being a competitive guy, I want my stats to look good. The number of coupl...

The Facebook Maybe

Granted, I'm a pastor. I have Type-A tendencies. Ok, my tendencies border on freakish OCD behavior patterns, but... Few things bother me more than the Facebook 'maybe'. I suppose I could go on and on about the grey areas of our society and the refusal of people to accept absolute standards. I could discuss the great need of people to accept that what is wrong for one person is likely wrong for everyone. I should certainly be concerned about mentioning that someone might have sin in their life. But I don't believe the Facebook 'maybe' is quite sin. Perhaps if I were coming up with new sins, I would add this to the list. But alas... Some might think the Facebook 'maybe' did not exist prior to the Internet, but they would be wrong. When I was in high school and asked a girl out on a date, I would normally be told that if they had no other plans, if nobody else called them, if there was nothing good on television and their hair did not need washing, then per...

Crossing the Lines

I'm sure this has been said before. Certainly I'm not the first to rant about this. I'm positive I won't be the last. And in my usual manner of coming to a story late, I want to comment on Bobby Petrino, recently fired head coach of Arkansas. But this isn't really about Bobby, or I should say, not just about Bobby. He is simply the latest in a series of stories where big-time athletes, coaches, or celebrities does something stupid and gets caught. But that's not the story, because, quite frankly, we all do dumb stuff. But when too many people get angry, defenders line up to separate the personal life from the professional life. I actually heard a woman quoted, in relation to the Arkansas story, saying that Bobby has won a lot of football games for them. Oh, so that makes it ok? Arkansas went 11-2 last season, so the head coach can be immoral? Is that how this is supposed to work? Why draw the line there? If splitting personal decisions from professiona...

Rick Nier...Woo!

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