"If I be a Father, where is Mine honour?"

"A son honoureth his father, and a servant his master: if then I be a father, where is mine honour? and if I be a master, where is my fear? saith the LORD of hosts" (Malachi 1:6).

God asked the priests of Malachi's day this question, and I suspect He is asking it of His church today. 

Where is God's honor when we reach out to Him only as a divine genie, rubbing the lamp of prayer to make our wishes come through? We hand Him a long list of requests, unconcerned with whether they sit inside His will, so long as we tack "in Jesus' name" onto the end like a magic password. We have turned prayer into a vending machine transaction: insert scripture, select desire, collect blessing. But a genie serves you. A Father raises you.

Where is God's honor when we magnify our fears over His word, our problems over His power? When the fear of the demonic paralyzes us from moving as He has commanded - so we stay silent when we should speak, stay seated when we should stand? When we use our physical limitations, our emotional fragility, our "I'm just not built for that" as an excuse to shirk what He has plainly asked us to do, forgetting that Moses tried that exact excuse at the burning bush and it made God angry (Exodus 4:10-14)? When we look at our nation, our finances, our failing bodies, and see these as giants and ourselves as grasshoppers, instead of acknowledging that our God is mighty to save, to deliver, to heal and to transform? 

Where is God's honor when we turn our churches into altars of our own ambition? We hone our talents in the choir, on the mic, behind the pulpit - not to lift Christ, but to build a platform for our own name and fame. We give God the crumbs of our week: an hour of half-attentive prayer, a Sunday service we half-attend even while present. Then we jump off the couch, roll up our sleeves, and pour every ounce of our strength and strategy into the pursuit of gold, of followers, of promotion, of the next rung on a ladder we never once asked Him about. Our diligence for our own kingdom is fierce. Our diligence for His is an afterthought squeezed in wherever it fits.

This is the same indictment God laid on the priests of Malachi's day. They were offering sacrifices - so on paper, they were doing "ministry." But what they were bringing to the altar: the blind, the lame, the sick animals they had no other use for anyway (Malachi 1:8). Would their governor have accepted such an offering from them? Then why did they think God, the LORD of hosts, would accept it from His own priests? We are guilty of the same trade. We give God our leftovers - leftover time, leftover energy, leftover devotion, leftover reverence and fear, leftover regard - and expect Him to receive it as though it were our best.

And this is what should stop us cold: the opening passage isn't God remarking on how strangers relate to Him. It's a passage about priests. Insiders. People who knew the language of worship fluently, who could quote the law without blinking. Familiarity with the house of God is no guarantee of honor toward the God of the house. You can know every hymn and still not know how to fear Him.

So what does honoring Him actually look like, practically, this week?

It looks like praying "not my will, but Thine be done" and meaning it enough to actually adjust your plans when the answer is no. 

It looks like moving in obedience while your knees are still shaking, because fear of God has finally outweighed fear of everything else. 

It looks like giving your first, best hours to Him – not the exhausted, distracted dregs left over after you have spent yourself on everyone and everything else. 

It looks like using your gift in church the same way you would use a borrowed tool: carefully, gratefully, and in a manner that brings credit to the One who lent it to you, not to the one holding it.

A father asks for honor. A master asks for fear. Our God is both to us, and He is asking us the same question He asked then.

If He is our Father, where is His honor? If He is our Master, where is His fear?

Heavenly Father, forgive me for the crumbs I have offered You while pouring my strength elsewhere. Forgive me for treating You as a genie instead of approaching You as my Father. Show me where I have magnified my fears and my limitations above Your power. Teach me, show me how, to bring You my first and not my leftovers, that Your name may be glorified, that You may receive Your due honor in my life. In Jesus' name. Amen.