God Motivation and the Toilet Bowl

From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them. Return to me, and I will return to you, says the LORD of hosts. But you say, ‘How shall we return?’ Will man rob God? Yet you are robbing me. But you say, ‘How have we robbed you?’ In your tithes and contributions. You are cursed with a curse, for you are robbing me, the whole nation of you. Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.
(Malachi 3:7-10)

This is the last of the Q&A time in Malachi.  The pattern has been for the people to hear a statement from the LORD, question it, and then receive an explanation.  This instance is no different.  God issued them a challenge, informing them that there had been a long line of disobedience through an ignoring of His statutes; "return to me" is His command with the promise that He will come to them in the same way if such repentance takes place.  But like we often do, the people of Malachi's day pleaded ignorance, not knowing what it looked like to come back to God.  Perhaps by this time they were beginning to sense that they really did have issues they were needing to work through, but there was still a lack of understanding concerning what was really amiss.  And just as in times past, God clarifies--they had robbed Him of the tithes and offerings they were called to give.  What we can gather from the text as a whole is that people were struggling to make ends meet.  Things with the crops were not going well and the people were not even thinking about giving the required tenth to the LORD.

You can hear in all of this the downward spiraling as disobedience yielded withdrawal of blessing which then yielded further disobedience.  On one level, the people were not willing to see God as their Master to be reverenced and obeyed.  On another level, they were not willing to trust Him as their Provider and Sustainer, essentially failing to see Him as Savior.  So it is all too often with us.  While I'm not going to answer the question here of whether or not the New Testament calls us to give a tithe to God, I am going to speak to the fact that we get ourselves in a tizzy or even harden our hearts against Him when He clearly presents Himself as the only One we need both in this life and in the one to come.  We may in one moment confess Jesus Christ as the Lord with full authority but then deny that we believe such when He calls us to do that which is uncomfortable.  We may pledge our allegiance to Him at one turn but then refuse to trust He will supply us what we need for the battles of life, for the daily bread for our bodies, and for the energy to persevere when the day grows long.  We suddenly start to feel ourselves spinning in the same downward spiral, stuck in the toilet of despair and desperation looking to the refuse for rescue as it too heads in the same direction.

We don't have to be there...not for another instant.  God says, "put me to the test," a statement from Him that we usually observe as something we aren't supposed to do.  But this isn't the kind of test where we push God with our distrusting actions to see if He will come through but rather the kind where we push Him with our faithful obedience to see if He is the God who keeps His promises.  He asks us to make Him our motivation for what we do rather than seeing what we can get away with and still make it out alive.  Put God to the test today; taste and see that He is good.