Note #1: Verses 6 and 7 contain the second judgment from God that Israel’s ministers flatly rejected. God tells them that by worshipping contrary to His commandments, they are despising His name, but they are indignant at the suggestion. They cannot understand how God feels about what they are doing because they have lost their connection with Him. Every messenger of God in the Bible proclaimed the truth that if God is not worshipped the way He says to worship Him, then the worship offered to Him is abhorrent to Him, even prayer and sacrifice if they are offered by the disobedient (Prov. 15:8; 21:27; 28:9).

Note #2: There can be no doubt at all that Malachi, like many other true prophets, was rejected and persecuted by his fellow Israelites. In the time he lived, Malachi was not an honored man in Israel; he was despised just as the holy things of God’s temple were despised. Israel and her priests would not have despised the things of God while they honored the men of God.

Note #3: Every true minister of God in the Old Testament understood that humans did not know how to worship God acceptably, that we have to receive from God instructions as to how to worship Him. Every wise and faithful child of God now also understands that human ideas about how to worship God are no good. Faithful Israelites loved the fact that God had condescended to come down out of heaven on Mount Sinai and show Moses how they were to worship Him acceptably so that their sins would be forgiven. Every faithful minister of God under the law understood that, and every faithful minister of God in this covenant understands it. No proud person can understand it because to understand it requires humility. We must humble ourselves to say, “God, I don’t know how to please you. Help me!”

We are extraordinarily blessed to have had the Son of God condescend to us on earth and tell us, “True worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is a spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:23–24). We are blessed to know that! We are blessed to understand that the ceremonies of the law were mere figures of something else – they were not meant to last forever! We are blessed to understand that the baptism of John was a figure of a baptism that would last forever, the baptism of the holy Ghost! We are blessed to know that the circumcision of Abraham was only a figure of something that would last forever – Jesus’ circumcision of the heart by the Spirit of God!

“We are the circumcision,” Paul wrote, “who worship in the Spirit of God, and boast in Christ Jesus, and who put no confidence in the flesh” (Phip. 3:3). Paul described that circumcision in Romans 2:28–29 when he said, “For he is not a Jew who is one externally; nor is circumcision external, in the flesh. But he is a Jew who is one internally, and circumcision is in the heart by the Spirit, not by the letter, whose praise is not of men but of God.”

That is the circumcision which makes us – our lives and our worship – acceptable to God. What Abraham’s circumcision pointed to is the baptism of the holy Ghost because when we receive the baptism of the holy Ghost, fleshly entanglements are cut out of our hearts. The holy Ghost baptism cuts out of our hearts all worldly attachments and makes us citizens of a heavenly kingdom and members of the family of God. And because we are circumcised that way, we can ask, as Jesus did, “Who is my mother, and my brother, and my sister? Whoever does the will of my Father who is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt. 12:48–50; Lk. 8:21).

Under the Old Covenant, a person had to observe ceremonies, had to walk in them, and had to worship in them or – what did God say? – “You are despising my name.” God was telling Israel that they were thinking of His table as contemptible because they were not using His table as He said to use it; they were offering something on it, unsanctified bread, that was contrary to the law.

Likewise, in this covenant, we are despising God’s name and thinking of His table as contemptible when we partake of a carnal communion ceremony. Ceremonies have nothing to do with the holy Ghost; they have nothing to do with this covenant! Jesus said, “Those who worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4:23–24). So then, if it is God’s chosen way of worship, let us worship Him that way, and that way alone! If we add a water baptism to the spiritual baptism of Christ, then, in God’s view, we are despising His name. From God’s perspective, we are thinking of His Son’s spiritual baptism as if it were contemptible because it is only one of the baptisms we practice; it is not as precious to us as it is to God. If it were, the Son’s baptism would be the only baptism we trust.

What is lacking in God’s baptism of the holy Ghost or with God’s spiritual communion, that we should partake of any other kind? The communion of the holy Ghost is the table of the Lord in this covenant, and we are treating that precious, holy table with contempt whenever we add a ceremony to it. Participating in a Christian communion service is treating the Lord’s table, the table of the Spirit, as contemptible. What Christians need to do is to get drunk on the new wine of the holy Ghost, and they’ll forget about earthly wine.

Where I am pastor, we do not despise the name of the Lord. We honor the name of the Lord by not adding a ceremony to what He’s given us in Christ. When He baptizes us with the holy Ghost into the body of Christ, why would we want to join a church as if being a member of the body of Christ is insufficient? There is not a Christian church on the planet that came from God. They are all of man. That is why the holy Ghost is crying out, “Come out of her, my people! Stop despising my name! Stop treating my Spirit like it’s a spare tire to be used only once in a while. The Spirit is the whole car! Without it, you’re not going anywhere!”

Do not despise what came to us in the name of Jesus. The holy Ghost, which was sent to us in Jesus’ name, was not an addition to the law’s ceremonies; it was sent to fulfill them and finish them, to take their place and to give us something far better – eternal life! And if we get enough of that Spirit of life within us, we will not even want a ceremonial religion. God’s people are in the ceremonial religion of Christianity now because they do not have enough of God’s life. If they had enough of this life of God within them, they would come out of that death. Let’s not quench this life in order to carry out that ceremony. Let’s not consider His communion to be contemptible. Let’s not quench the Spirit to practice an earthly communion ceremony. Let’s love Him! Let’s love His table! Let’s honor His name!

These things in Malachi and in the other prophets are written for our admonition, Paul said. They’re written for our learning. What, then, are we supposed to learn from them? What is the admonition that the Lord has provided for us in Malachi’s words if it’s not something about recognizing the name of the Lord and honoring it?

We do not honor Jesus by having a foot-washing ceremony. We despise him by doing that. That’s not what he was instituting. He washed his disciples’ feet, and the men whose feet he washed did not understand what he was doing. He washed their feet the same night that he broke bread and handed it to them, and they didn’t understand that, either. He told them they didn’t understand. Peter wasn’t going to let Jesus wash his feet, and he said to Peter, “You don’t know what I’m doing.” Now, Peter had enough sense to know that Jesus was washing his feet. We know that because Peter asked Jesus not to wash his feet. But Peter didn’t know what Jesus was really doing. Likewise, the vast majority of God’s people around this world don’t know what Jesus was doing. He was acting the part of a servant when he washed the disciples’ feet. And when he was passing out the bread and the wine, he was acting out the part of a servant, and he said, “Do this in remembrance of me.” He did not mean, “Carry this on as a dead ceremony in remembrance of me.” He meant, “Get in this spirit of humility that I live in and act toward one another the way I act toward you, and do it in remembrance of me, the greatest servant of all!”

May God open up the eyes of His people! May He open the ears of His people so that they can hear His call to come out of Christianity and walk with Him in the Spirit! And may God help us to do what we can to hasten that glad day! We are all less than we should be in Christ because so many of our brothers and sisters are blind and in bondage to the religious system called Christianity. That is why I must keep saying, “Let my people go! Let my people go!” God’s people do not belong in a Christian communion service. They do not belong in Christian choir robes. They do not belong behind Christianity’s stained glass. They do not belong in those Christian foot-washing ceremonies. They do not belong in that Christian baptismal pool. They do not belong there! That is why I say, “Let them go! Christianity, let my people go!” May God let it happen!

God may have to strike Christianity with plagues to make His people willing to go, but that will be a good thing for those who love God sincerely. God has done something like that before. He loved His people enough to plague the whole nation of Egypt, which helped make the Israelites willing to leave the country. It took both Moses pulling and Pharaoh pushing to get God’s people out of Egypt. But whatever it takes, the benefits they received out there in the desert alone with God more than made up for all the things they enjoyed in Egypt – not to mention their deliverance from slavery. We are not created in Christ Jesus to be the slaves of men. We are created in Christ Jesus to be the servants of God.

The doctrine of Christ sets us free from the flesh’s ignorance of holy things, and its lusts. It sets us free from spiritual darkness, from confusion, from misunderstanding the words of God. It creates within us God’s dictionary for what His words mean. When God uses the word “baptism”, what is He talking about? He is talking about what His Son does to people, not to what John the Baptist did or other men can do to people with earthly water. The true doctrine puts us on the same page with Jesus. Let’s honor His name by refusing to dishonor what has come to us in His name. Paul even said that we can adorn the doctrine of Christ (Tit. 2:10). Let’s do that. Let’s adorn the baptism of Christ and the communion of Christ by honoring his baptism alone, and by honoring his communion alone to save us. Let’s adorn the gospel with righteousness and humility and love.

God is not a beggar, so eager to be praised that He accepts any kind of worship from any kind of spirit. He did not need the animals that He commanded Israel to sacrifice. He said, “If I were hungry, I would not tell you. . . . For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Ps. 50:10–12). He did everything that He did for Israel’s good, not His own! Israel needed a way to get to God. Before God gave them His law, they had no guide to His throne. But God gave it to them! Wasn’t that love? Wasn’t that guidance precious?

In this New Testament, God made the sacrifice instead of commanding us to make one, and He made the greatest sacrifice that He could make; He sacrificed His precious Son. And the Son, resurrected from the dead, ascended to the Father and asked Him to give us, not another set of ceremonies, but eternal life – the same kind of life that the Father shared with him when He created him. And then, when the Father accepted the Son’s sacrifice in heaven and gave him his request, the holy life of God was poured out from the Father’s breast onto about 120 souls gathered in an upper room in Jerusalem. When it was poured out, that eternal life made a noise “like a violent, rushing wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them divided tongues like fire, and it sat upon each one of them, and they were all filled with the holy Spirit, and they began to speak with other tongues” (Acts 2:3–4). And they began to be able to bear to hear and declare the word of God.

Let’s honor that! Let’s adorn the blessings of God that His Son purchased for us with his blood! Let’s make Jesus glad that he suffered and died. Let’s make the Father glad that He sent His precious Son into this world to give his life for us. Let’s not make them wonder if it was all done for nothing. Let’s live right, obey God, and not despise His name by polluting His pure worship by adding Christian ceremonies to it.

Like Israel’s ministers, who sarcastically asked Malachi, “What are you talking about, ‘despising God’s name’? What are you talking about, ‘contemptible’?”, most of God’s people react with indignation when they are told that to carry out Christian baptism in water is to despise God’s baptism in spirit, the baptism that His Son died to make available to us. It’s the reaction of God’s people now whenever God’s ministers warn them that when they celebrate Christian communion, they are despising the communion of the holy Ghost. The baptism, the communion, and the feasts that we experience now in the Spirit come in the name of Jesus because the Spirit itself came in his name (Jn. 14:26), and to add to God’s spiritual worship a ceremonial baptism and a ceremonial communion is to treat Jesus’ baptism and communion as contemptible.

God is not going to accept a diseased sacrifice, a blemished sacrifice, or a polluted sacrifice. Worship must be His way, or it is unclean! We who have His Spirit are going to give Him our best, or we will receive His worst, and our best is not what we think is best but what He says to do.

Is that too hard a saying, when God has given us His own Son’s life? Let’s treat the grace of God with honor! Let’s bring honor to it by the way we live. Let’s not pollute God’s holy way of worship that He made possible by the sacrifice of His dear Son. Let’s be content with Jesus. Within ourselves, we are all ignorant of how to worship God acceptably. We all need a guide to know how to worship God rightly, just as the Israelites did before God gave them the law, but if we humble ourselves to worship God as Jesus said we must worship Him, our worship will always be acceptable.

Note: Because the theme of doing things God’s way plays such a large role in Malachi’s book, and because the priests and Levites are a special focus in it, God’s way of caring for the needs of His ministers is emphasized, beginning here, at Malachi 1:10. God instituted a perfect system for supplying the needs for His ministers, and for a man to seek a ministerial position for pay is not it. The call of God is a call to His way of doing things, and it is not God’s way for a man to rent himself out as a pastor.

Being a pastor is not a job; it is a calling, and to hire a man to act as a pastor, or to be hired to act as a pastor, is evil. That was the sin of Balaam, who gave spiritual counsel to the Moabite king, Balak, in order to earn the wages that Balak offered him (Num. 22–24; 31:15–16). It is a sin so egregious that in the last book of the Bible, Jesus was still condemning those who followed Balaam’s example:

Revelation 2

Balaam taught those things to Balak and the Moabites for money. He got out from under the anointing of God that was upon him and started teaching the Moabites what they wanted to hear, for money. He became a performer, playing the role for an agreed-upon price.

Many who grew up in the abomination of Christianity will remember men who came to their church to deliver what is called a “trial sermon”. What these men were doing was auditioning for a part that they wanted to play. Sometimes, different ministers would come on successive Sundays to deliver their trial sermons, all of them hoping to please the audience enough to be hired as their pastor. That is the way it is within the religious institution of Christianity, but in all of human history, God has never sent anybody to do a trial anything. He has never auditioned to be God, and His ministers have never auditioned to be His ministers. With God, everything is real to start with, and that is why men who audition for the role of pastor cannot possibly be pleasing to God. The very reason their audition is called a “trial sermon” is that men have invited them to audition for a job. If God had sent them, it would not be a trial sermon; it would be a real one. It is only where men are hired to minister that congregations put them on trial to see whether those men can sufficiently please them.

Paul saw it coming:

2Timothy 4

Is there anybody who can picture Malachi auditioning to be a prophet for Israel? Is that the way of God? Has it ever been the way of God? If a congregation were wise enough to know who God wanted to be their pastor, they wouldn’t even need him. Nothing demonstrates the mass confusion that exists within the religion of Christianity than congregations choosing and hiring their pastors. Any man hired by a congregation knows from the start that he had better not tell those people anything they do not want to hear. From the start, if he is sincere, he feels great pressure not to acknowledge what he hears from God if God gives him things to say that his employers – the congregation – do not want to hear. To do so may cost him his job. Such a man knows that he had better not be a Malachi, or an Ezekiel, or a Jeremiah, called by God, ordained by God, and sent by God. Instead, he must be a good employee if he wants to keep his job.

There are good, sincere men entangled in the wicked Christian system of hiring and firing ministers. I have met some of them and I loved them, but it is wrong for them to rent themselves out to please a congregation, and in their hearts, they know it.

Most of God’s children can scarcely believe what God has done with men like me and with saints like those who meet at my house because they’ve never experienced God putting a congregation together with a pastor of His choice, not theirs. There is not a person in my congregation that I recruited. God caused us to meet over the years, one here and two there. And after we met, we discovered that God had created within our hearts a common love for the truth, and that common love of the truth knit our hearts together to serve Christ. The body of Christ is the work of God, not a work of man, and that truth applies to the world-wide body of Christ as well as to local bodies of believers. Just like the new birth, a true body of believers is created “not of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God” (Jn. 1:13). It is the work of God or it is just another worthless religious organization.

My congregation did not hire me and they cannot fire me. Such a thing does not exist in God’s kingdom. We meet in my home, which has become their home in Christ. In fact, we are so close that I cannot think of one of them who knocks when they come into my house. We have been made a family by God, a real family that knows and loves one another. We really feel like brothers and sisters. If God’s children would just believe what He has done here among us, they might begin to experience the heretofore unimagined, sweet benefits of unity in a body of believers, the unity that is in the Spirit, outside the white-washed walls of Christianity.

Jesus warned his disciples that a man who is hired to watch over God’s sheep will not stay with them when hard times come upon the flock – not necessarily because he is wicked but simply because the sheep are not his:

John 10

If the sheep belong to the shepherd, the shepherd has nowhere to go when the wolf approaches. He will stay and defend the sheep because they are his; they are his responsibility,his livelihood, and their spiritual well-being secures his reward from God in the end. Being hired to be a pastor does not give a man the anointing to care for God’s flock. A seminary degree does not give a man what God’s sheep need to be healthy spiritually. Only God does that. The Christian system of hiring and firing ministers can never produce acceptable fruit to God. Because my congregation did not hire me, I am free to hear whatever the Master says and to teach it, and they have learned that I will do so. In fact, they love it that way because that is the way of Christ, and they love him. I am their servant in Christ, but he alone is my employer.

Note #1: This prophecy would have been understood by no Israelite at that time to mean that God would one day turn to the Gentiles instead of them. They would have understood it to mean that God would one day bring the Gentiles into covenant with Him under the law of Moses, with Israel continuing to be His chosen people. It would have been completely unthinkable to them that God would make a new and eternal covenant, which they, as a nation, would reject and that God would then reject them and open the door of eternal life to the Gentiles.

Note #2: Paul said that worship is made acceptable by the holy Ghost (Rom. 15:16). This means that those who have received the holy Ghost have been given power to make acceptable offerings to God. The offering that believers are privileged now to offer to God is perfect, pure, holy, and eternal. There is nothing wrong with the holy Ghost! When saints worship God in the Spirit, it is perfectly pure and acceptable. That is the kind of worship Jesus said God wants. Before the Son came, God accepted worship that included corruptible things such as earthly water, earthly incense, earthly sacrifices, and fleshly circumcision, but now He commands every person everywhere to repent and bow before Jesus, and He will accept no worship but that which has been sanctified by the Spirit His Son purchased for us with his sacrificial death. In Christ, we have been created to be the kind of people who can worship God acceptably and render Him praise that is perfectly pure, as the Psalmist prophesied:

Psalm 102

How valuable, how precious a blessing is it to receive the Spirit of God and be numbered among this created people? It is indeed a “pearl of great price”, worth all that a man has, or is, or ever hopes to be. But how “lightly esteemed” it has seemed to the people chosen by God to receive the blessing of His calling, as did God’s priests in Malachi’s time:

Note: The “it” that Israel has profaned is the name of the Lord (verse 11). This part of Malachi’s prophecy reveals that, from God’s perspective, to alter His way of worship is to show disrespect for Him. Israel’s priests did not think so, but they were profaning the name of God by failing to honor God’s table in the Temple. To God’s own priests, God’s way of worship had become wearisome. However, the truth was that they had grown tired of God’s way of worship, not because they were tired of performing ceremonies, but because they had grown tired of Him (Isa. 43:22). Other gods interested them more. Whenever God’s people grow weary in well-doing, it is evidence that they have grown weary of God Himself.

Shortly after this covenant began, most of those who believed in Christ grew tired of him. They grew tired of being misunderstood and persecuted; they grew tired of the reproach of Christ; they grew tired of not fitting in with the world. They traded their shout of victory for status among men. They left off the communion of the holy Ghost for the dead Christian communion service; they drifted away from the baptism of Christ to the more fashionable water baptisms that men could administer. The word of God became strange to them because they embraced the doctrines of men. The simple purity of holiness became an embarrassment to them because they had been seduced by appearances of good.

“The kingdom of God is righteousness and peace and joy” (Rom. 14:17). Are you tired of righteousness? Are you tired of peace? Are you tired of joy? If you don’t have those spiritual qualities in your life now, child of God, it can only be that somewhere along the way you grew tired of God and traded His gifts for something of this world. And by letting them go, you “despised the name of the Lord”. If you do have them, if you have held on to those treasures through all the things you have been through in this world, you have honored the name of the Lord.

Let’s not get tired of God; let’s get tired of ourselves. One brother in the Lord, many years ago now, broke down and wept as he said to me, “I’m so tired of making messes.” About once a year, through his own carelessness, he’d get himself into some sort of spiritual trouble, and he was going through one of those times. Unfortunately, he never got tired enough of himself to cease from his own ways, and not long after the day he broke down and cried with me, he made the biggest mess he had ever made, and fell away from Christ altogether. When we get tired enough of ourselves and the messes we make, we will repent and walk in the Spirit. Let’s get tired of ourselves and the messes we make, and lay hold on eternal life!

When I was in the seminary studying church history, I noticed that the only people in that thick history book with whom I felt any fellowship were some of the people whom churchmen called heretics. One group in Europe that seemed to be filled with the Spirit called their meetings “prophesyings”. Within a couple of generations after those in the original group passed away, the meetings were no longer called prophesyings, but lecturings. May God save us from degenerating from prophesying by the Spirit to the giving of lectures! I still can feel the fear of God that I felt when I read about that little group losing its power with God and renaming its meetings accordingly. The presence of God’s glory and power is what gives the body of Christ on earth its value and its distinction. Without that glory and that power, God’s people become just another worldly religious sect, despising the name of the Lord just like everybody else, only more guilty than the sinners who do it ignorantly.

The flesh is ashamed of the Spirit, and if you begin to walk in the flesh instead of the Spirit, you will find yourself ashamed of the power of God. But those who walk in the Spirit are ashamed of the flesh and its works. I would be ashamed to come into an assembly of saints so much in the flesh that I could not praise God. To practice water baptism or a dead communion ceremony would embarrass me. I rejoice in the works of Christ instead!

God promised that if we would keep our minds on Him, that is, on what He says and what He does, we would have perfect peace (Isa. 26:3). It is when our minds drift away from the works of God and we begin to partake of the carnal ways of man that divisions arise. That is when we begin to debate whether we should immerse or sprinkle with water; that is when divisions arise over whether we should hold communion once or twice a month, or if non-church members should partake with us. There are no such divisions in the holy Ghost. In the Spirit, Christ baptizes when he will, and he celebrates communion with faithful believers all the time. It is only in the flesh that divisions exist. There are no denominations in the holy Ghost; the word “denominations” is used by men to disguise what denominations really are: divisions contrary to the will of God.

God does not recognize denominations. He blesses His people wherever He finds them – as long as they are still humble enough to receive His blessings. And because God does not recognize denominations, His faithful servants do not recognize them. There is nothing about them that is holy; they are altogether the work of the flesh. They have no authority over the soul of any child of God, and when God’s children come to understand that, there will be an exodus out of Christianity that will make Moses jealous.