“Should people cheat God? Yet you have cheated me! But you ask, ‘What do you mean? When did we ever cheat you?'” You have cheated me of the tithes and offerings due to me…Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple.” – Malachi 3: 8-10

If there’s one thing God really doesn’t like, it’s us putting things above Him.

The very first command He gave was to love and revere Him with all our hearts.

But in a lot of cases, our lives don’t reflect that we actually put Him first.

• We don’t talk to Him first thing in the morning.

• We go to other people first with our problems instead of Him.

• We give Him what we can spare after we’ve spent all of our earnings on ourselves.

And we fool ourselves into being satisfied with mediocre worship.

The Israelites convinced themselves that it was okay to offer up lame and blind animals to God.

They thought “We’re giving something, so that counts, right?”

But how disrespectful was it for them to offer God something that they themselves didn’t want and had no use for?!

In essence, their actions showed a serious lack of understanding of who God was and the honor He deserved.

What God wants from us is not simply our money or other material sacrifices, but our true love and reverence for Him.

We’ve got to honor Him with every aspect of our lives. 

When we do that genuinely and selflessly, God says He will pour out a blessing on us so great that we won’t be able to contain it!

So it doesn’t make logical sense to cheat God. Because when we cheat God, we cheat ourselves.  

Be blessed,

Alexia

Prayer: God, help me to honor you in every aspect of my life – with my time, my money, and everything else in between. Give me a heart that sacrifices for you, and give me the understanding to know that you will give me a surplus of my needs if I would only put you first. In Jesus’ Name, I pray, Amen.