This sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Advent was preached on 12/6/09 at Our Savior. The text is Malachi 3:1-4. http://ref.ly/Ml3.1-4
Get Ready to Get Clean!
It's time to get ready! So much of what we do in our lives needs a time to prepare and get ready beforehand. When you take a test at school, you have to get ready and study before you take it, or it probably won't go well. When musicians play a concert, the concert isn't the first time they ever pick up their instrument. No, they spend long hours practicing to get ready. And I'm pretty sure no one here this morning woke up in your bed and then came directly here to church. There were some things you had to do first! You got dressed, maybe you ate breakfast. You got ready.
Interestingly, a lot of our getting ready involves cleaning of some sort. Maybe when you get ready for the day, you take a shower and brush your teeth -- both a form of cleaning. If you have guests coming over for dinner, what do you do? You clean, pick up the house, maybe vacuum, and make sure the place is presentable for guests. You clean up to make sure everything's ready.
During this season of Advent, we get ready for the Savior. But how? How do we do it? How do we prepare our minds and hearts for Jesus' coming? Logically, you might think we should really try to clean ourselves up first and make sure we're good enough for Jesus. But as our text from Malachi shows us this morning, it doesn't do us any good to clean ourselves up to meet Jesus. Try as we might, we can never clean ourselves of our sins. We can never be perfect. We can never hide the sins that have dirtied our hearts and souls.
So to really get ready for Jesus, we need to listen to John the 
Our text is from the book of the prophet Malachi, which is the last book of the Old Testament. By the time Malachi wrote his book, a lot had happened to Israel. They had been led to and given the Promised Land. But they had also turned away from the true God to false gods. Because of this, God had sent the Assyrians and Babylonians to take them away from their own land. But then, about 100 years before Malachi, some of the Israelites had returned from captivity in Babylon back to Jerusalem and Judea.
This was unheard of in the ancient world. Usually, once a group of people was carried off into captivity, they never came back. But God brought his people back! So, as you can imagine, they were fired up to be back! They built a new temple after the old one had been destroyed. They were dedicated to God again! It looked like things would finally be good for them all, that they would stay true to God, and that they'd live happily ever after.
It didn't work out that way, though. By the time of Malachi, the people weren't so fired up anymore. They were kind of sluggish, kind of going through the motions. Their hearts were no longer one hundred percent dedicated to God. Oh sure, they still worshiped him. They still came to the temple and brought their offerings. But their hearts just weren't in it any more.
Sound familiar? In some ways, Malachi might as well have been written in our time. We are just as much in need of the challenge and the call to repentance that God gave through Malachi in our text and that God later gave through John the Baptist.
It's John the Baptist that our text talks about first. "See, I will send my messenger, who will prepare the way before me." (Mal. 3:1) The people needed to be woken up from their spiritual apathy and cleaned up from the filth and grime of their sins. Thankfully God was going to send a messenger to prepare the way first. This is the prophecy of John the Baptist who would get the people ready for Jesus to come. And it's John's message of repentance that we need to get us ready still today.
Because Jesus is coming soon! "Then suddenly the Lord you are seeking will come to his temple; the messenger of the covenant, whom you desire, will come,” says the Lord Almighty." (Mal. 3:1) Yes, Jesus will come unexpectedly. He came when people weren't expecting to Bethlehem nearly 2,000 years ago, and he will come unexpectedly when he comes again. Sounds like a good thing! But is it? Are you really ready?
Malachi asked the same question. "But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap. He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver." (Mal. 3:2-3) The reason you need to get ready for Jesus is because he is going to clean up when he comes.
This isn't just a little tidying up. Our text says he is like a refiner's fire. If you in a mine and you find silver, it's not going to be pure silver. There will be parts of silver and parts of other stuff, less valuable stuff that you have to get rid of. So you burn it away, you refine it in fire until you have pure silver. That's what Jesus will do at the end of the world. He will purge away with fire anything that's not pure. So are you ready?
Again, Jesus is called a launderer's soap. This isn't a nice, gentle hand soap we're talking about here. This is the kind of soap that cleans so aggressively it burns, like lye or bleach. What do you do when you clean with bleach? You've got to watch out for it! If it gets on your clothes it could ruin them. This is a cleaning that's so thorough it destroys all traces of what's dirty.
And that's not a pleasant experience. Picture a young child who's just eaten a meal. Her face is covered in food. But then mom appears with a washcloth in her hand. What does that child do? She says, "No!" I'm clean enough! Don't touch me with that! And she squirms and wriggles to try to keep that cloth away from her.
That's how we act sometimes with our sins. Jesus is coming to cleanse the world from all sin forever? Nah. Not for me. I'm not dirty with sin. I'm pretty good. Sure, I'm not perfect. But I go to church (at least once in a while), and I try to do my best.
No! That's not good enough! Your sins are serious, even the "little" sins. Each of them is a stain so deep that it seems like it could never come off. And if our attitude toward that sin is that it's no big deal, then when Jesus returns to clean up, he's going to wipe us right out and burn us away forever.
No, instead we need to look at our sins. Like how you would take that messy child to a mirror and show her how messy she really is. We need to look into the mirror of God's law and see how serious our sins really are. We need to see the stain of our desiring what's not ours, the dirt of our lies, the filth of our hate, the rottenness of our lack of respect for God's authority. Above all, we need to see the blackest stain of all on ourselves -- when we have put something, anything, ahead of the one true God.
These are not stains we can clean up ourselves. If you never brushed your teeth for several years, and then had a dentist's appointment, what would you do? You'd probably try to quickly brush your teeth really well and floss before seeing the dentist. But you know it wouldn't do any good! The damage would already be done. No quick brushing could take it away. The dentist would try, but the teeth would probably have to go.
The same would be for our sinful selves standing before our holy God. Nothing we can do can cover up those stains, that rot, that filth. So what can we do? How can we get ready to get clean? Listen to John the Baptist. Repent! Look in the mirror, recognize your sins, and then plead for your life. All you can say before God is: I don't deserve anything from you. I am guilty. I beg you, have mercy on me.
And he has had mercy on us. Jesus has paid for those sins. Jesus himself was punished for our mistakes, he has already cleaned up our dirt and filth. He washed them away in his blood shed on the cross. He scrubbed them out of us in our baptism. Yes, we are forgiven. We are holy. In God's eyes we are clean and pure because we trust in Jesus' salvation for us.
True, we're not perfect until we get to heaven. That's why we live in repentance, constantly turning back to our Savior for forgiveness and cleansing. We continually need to get ready to get clean! And that's exactly what Jesus does for us.
Our text continues, "He will purify the Levites and refine them like gold and silver. Then the Lord will have men who will bring offerings in righteousness, and the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem will be acceptable to the Lord, as in days gone by, as in former years." (Mal. 3:3-4)
In the Old Testament, only the Levites and priests could serve God in his temple. It was off-limits to anyone else. But Jesus purifies all of us to serve him. When we recognize our forgiveness, we want to serve him by obeying him and serving him with our whole lives. The Apostle Peter says, that "You...are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ." (1 Pet. 2:5)
Now, in Christ, we are all priests who serve God with everything we are. Every action is for him, in thanks to him for our salvation. We don't go through the motions, we live for him from our heart and soul, as we are built up in him through the Word and Sacraments.
Peter says later on, "You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people belonging to God, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. " (2 Peter 2:9) Jesus chose us to be his, he chose us to praise him with our lives. Let's do that! Let's repent of our sins and declare God's praises with everything we do.
Because as we do, we'll be ready! We'll be ready for Jesus to come. We'll repent and see how much we need his forgiveness. We'll go to him time and again pleading for his forgiveness and rejoicing that it's already ours. We'll go out in the world praising and thanking him in all we do. We'll be ready for him to come again to clean up this world for good and take us home. May that day come quickly! Stay ready for it!
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